Yesterday I finished the last of the second set of 35 story boards. Its been a long and tedious job. Tedious not just because its quite hard work putting these things together, but also because it’s not an exciting new thing I’m exploring – it’s a second time around using the same old format to explore how it works out with different types of artefacts. Anyway, it’s done now, so it just remains to create the links to all the additional material on each of the 35 pages. However, while its fresh in my mind, I’ve listed below some of my observations as I constructed the story boards:

• The general procedure I followed was: first import an image of the artefact in question, then copy and paste each of the pre-recorded thoughts, and then add in the supporting material. Having the pre-recorded material was very helpful, and made it easy to get a quick start on the board.
• Sometimes I collapsed two or more thoughts together into a single piece of text; sometimes I adjusted the text; some of the thoughts I just left out; and sometimes I created new text. Such decisions were taken depending on what was most appropriate in order to tell the story. ie. the pre-recorded thoughts were simply the building blocks; the shape of the story was created when the elements were assembled together on the story board.
• On a number of occasions, I used the net to acquire additional information and images to support the story being constructed.
• On at least one occasion, I realised that the pre-recorded thoughts contained errors. For example, I recorded that the air conditioning was noisy on a particular foreign holiday; but realised in the course of creating the story board that it was, in fact, on another holiday that we had had that experience. It reminded me yet again, that humans often remember things incorrectly, and that one must always be aware of that possibility; and that, by setting down such erroneous rememberings in a physical artefact like a story board, incorrect information is given a degree of credence which may be hard to dislodge.
• I found it was hard to come up with variety in the way I was presenting each story board: I got into habits of where I was placing things on the story board, what font sizes I was using, and my use of coloured text and text boxes. I think this was partly because it was a prolonged process and I just wanted to get on and finish it; to get arty about each story board would have just taken too long.
• I became very aware that I was creating a particular version of the story in question – a version that was fashioned from the state of my mind at that point in time, and from the particular artefacts I was coming across and assembling to support the story. Each story that emerged was very much just one point of view out of the totality of views that were available from the all the possible memories and artefacts that could be brought to bear. However, that single point of view will gain a high degree of visibility, credibility and endurance by virtue of becoming a physical artefact (digital or printed) in its own right, to the probable detriment of all the other possible points of view.