To take an obvious example  here is an excerpt of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as performed by the RSC – I would suggest that the language very successfully paints pictures which one could visualise without actually watching.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the other hand, here is a an entirely wordless repetition of the same scene in the modality of dance. Nothing is lost here, and perhaps much is gained – it’s just a different experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In order to be a bit more
creative and experimental, I wanted to move away from purely text based posts.

Prompted by Poster (2006), and
in order to question the levels of morality we ascribe to non-human artefacts,
I created an ambiguous entity and he/it invited comments on its like-ability.
Jen’s response was the type of answer I was hoping for, so for a first attempt
at a multimodal entry I was satisfied. The experiment was, though, fairly
unsophisticated, and perhaps didn’t create a great deal of meaning.

My next post was an attempt to
disrupt text by displaying it as a mirror image. Kress (2005) says that ‘The
still existing common sense is that meaning and language is clear and reliable’
(p. 8) and that the reader follows conventions of order, for example starting
left to right. My aim was to disrupt this stability and force the reader to
defy convention.

I added two posts that linked
music and dance to the ‘being human’ theme. I chose not to add much text, and I feel that these entries are weak – ‘fillers’. Maybe the choices were
just wrong; maybe I was too restrictive on ‘no text’ and have presented
meaningless bits of media; maybe I have not yet embraced curation and fragments.

Finally, I veered into imagery
to support my thinking about ‘cities’ within digital culture. I toyed with the
idea of uploading the image alone but decided that without explication the
image would not be representative of my thoughts/learning.