SXSW Interactive 2011: Don’t Call it a Comeback. I’ve Been Here for Years.

And here we go again with SXSW Interactive – a festival to make other festivals shrink in fear. This mammoth affair brings some 75,000 people to Austin and for the last four years, I’ve been responsible for curating the live visualization team during the Interactive portion (and for showing up prepared for a panel that usually occurs at some unfortunate hour of the morning). This year, SXSW sold the rights to graphically record the keynotes to a corporate sponsor, Ogilvy, so the ladies of ImageThink curated the team and dispatched some fantastic folks, including Liisa Sorsa and Ryan Robinson. I’d like to publicly thank Marilyn Martin, the woman responsible for getting our first sales meeting with Hugh Forrest (Interactive Director) so we could convince him that graphic recording was worth the risk. It has now exploded in the festival and inspired a slew of visual notetakers. Long live visual thinking, and more power to SXSW for getting it.

You can see images from the event here on Flickr or by clicking the thumbnails in the gallery below.