It’s been a real pain getting this presentation – my micro-ethnography of a virtual community – published. I’ve had problems with BT Broadband, my new Mac, YouTube and Vimeo (and, just in case you wondering, no, no it’s not user error;-)!).

I am currently hating technology with a vengeance and wondering where I can get an application form to join the Amish (yes, I’d like to spend my days building barns and milking cows).

Anyway, here it is – click on the screenshot below to access it (WordPress won’t let me embed):

I didn’t upload the most recent version though which omitted image citations so here they are:

• Slide 4: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Anatomy_Lesson.jpg
• Slide 6: Map of online communities
  http://xkcd.com/256/
• Slide 13: Archaeology pit
  http://www.conservationhalton.on.ca/uploads/images/Archaeology%20Pit%20at%20Crawford%20Lake.jpg

I’ve was up at 6am today (Saturday!) recording the audio for the virtual community presentation. The family sleeps and the house enjoys a rare moment of quiet.

However, it made me think how much easier it is to create a textual artefact. The noise of kids, TVs and radios, Xbox 360s etc, can be sort of filtered out as I type but not really as I record. I made a few slides last night but had to bribe my children with lollies for just a couple of minutes of (relative) quiet.

Anyway, all this to say that multimodal artefact creation in an already noisy multimodal world is quite difficult. I may go all Godard on my next multimodal artefact and include some of the above-mentionned background noises – the traces of the material conditions of the text’s production. Or I may just write text … LOL!

A propos of my study of a virtual community, I’ve just made a Keynote (PowerPoint for Macs) presentation which I’m trying to convert into a Quicktime movie. It seems to do this ok although I keep falling down when I try to upload it to YouTube. I suspect it doesn’t like the option I’ve checked for manually advancing each slide. I may have to rethink this as a Slideshare presentation.

Grrr …

Looking forward to reading other’s ethnographic accounts though.