Although no one app or service swept the show this year, some of the buzzworthy tools, ideas, and trends at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive were

*Big data and data visualization: Visual.ly, Splunk, Show
*Intimate social networking: Highlight, GroupMe, Wendr, GonnaBe, Banjo, Sonar
*Hacktivism: Code for America, hackathons, self-hacking
*Curation: Brain Pickings, Percolate, FeedMagnet
*Retro technology: analog tele-phonographer, Please Shoot Yourself, Motorblade
*3D printing: MakerBot, RepRat
*Journalism and publishing: Storify (read previous ProfHacker posts), The Atavist, Rhizome, Wowio

With ScreenFlow you can record the contents of your entire monitor while also capturing your video camera, microphone and your computer audio. The easy-to-use editing interface lets you creatively edit your video, and add additional images, text, music and transitions for a truly professional-looking video. The finished result is a QuickTime or Windows Media movie, ready for publishing to your Web site or blog or directly to YouTube or Vimeo.

Where would you place the historical beginnings of information graphics?
I would start with early cave paintings. Seen from today's perspective, they unify visual storytelling and artistic beauty. In other words, art and science originally belonged together, and their division is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although there aren't many examples of infographics remaining from the following centuries, I'd stop talking about the beginnings by the year 1350, when the French bishop Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) "invented" the bar chart. Then, in 1493, Hartmann Schedel printed his famous book Schedel'sche Weltchronik, which explained how God spent the first seven days creating the world. Leonardo da Vinci's technical drawings were tools to clear up thoughts and convey knowledge in a visual manner. In 1786 William Playfair made extensive use of infographics, explaining economic matters in his Commercial and Political Atlas. Finally, in 1869 Charles Joseph Minard created an impressive diagram about Napoleon's march to Moscow and back... A taxonomy cannot relate to the aspect of visualisation—pie charts, bar charts, explosion drawings—which could disappear from time to time, but rather to the information behind the visualisation. All visual means that try to explain something to you can be placed into one of three groups. The first group is based on numbers, statistics and relations between sizes (data graphics); the second group is made up of objects (group system graphics); and the third one consists of spatial data like maps (spatial graphics). As these fields often overlap, it's also important to consider the borders between information design and, for example, illustration. I always say that information graphics has a strong appeal in the way it can clear up stuff and convey knowledge. Compared to examples such as illustration, information graphics always seeks to increase the knowledge of the reader, like every design process... The idea behind system graphics is not to make things more concrete but to make them more abstract. So by transforming photographs of surgery or forensic entomology into a graphic, you make them consumable. A translation into a vector graphic helps to look at things that would otherwise shock you. Only drawing gives you the ability to modulate details within one image. When you take a photograph you have the possibility to bring one object into the centre, but with an infographic you can show how it works internally... In perspectives the presence of the viewer is very strong, while an axonometric view has no centre point at all. We could say it's more democratic. In axonometric maps you're above the scene, not part of it, and when you don't have a vanishing point everything looks "over-parallel": everything is clear, clean and in the same light. Perhaps it's more of a communistic than democratic view of a scene. Often axonometric maps look more beautiful than reality itself... Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes. Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

The fact that slide projectors are now becoming a technology on the verge of death invokes a new feeling of nostalgia. Slide projectors were commonly used for varied purposes, from the family slideshow through the business meeting display, and up to illustrated lectures. These devices were commonplace and their aesthetic, sound, and use bring up familiarity and a certain tradition.

In 2005, shortly after Kodak's announcement that it will no longer produce slide projectors, curator Darsie Alexander at the Baltimore Museum of Art organized the exhibition "Slideshow." Featuring nineteen works made between the 1960s and the early 2000s by artists such as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Ceal Floyer, and Dan Graham, "Slideshow" celebrated the medium itself. 35mm slides have a number of built-in characteristics that appeal to artists. First and foremost, they are a high resolution color image, which, in the 1960s, was a refreshing change from the dominance of black and white photography. Secondly, the slide projectors have an inherent sense of narrative built into them.... PowerPoint comes with a culture of organizing information... Most art history classes are now taught using PowerPoint. We are getting more and more accustomed to viewing art digitally and online, insomuch that Google used its Street View technology to also make available virtual visits to museums across the world as part of Google Art Project... Maybe it is time that we throw thinking about the slideshow as a curatorial project into the mix.

A is for apple. B is for boy. C is for cat. It’s really that simple in Neil Winokur’s portfolio of 26 supersaturated color portraits of generic objects (and an occasional living being): one photograph for every letter of the alphabet, from A to Z. A native New Yorker, Mr. Winokur, 61, has been photographing everyday objects against color backdrops since the early 1990s... The simplicity of Mr. Winokur’s visual alphabet derives from the way children are taught to read. “I have young children, so I suppose I’m thinking more about the alphabet these days,” he said. “But I like that alphabets provide a foundation for all reading and writing, and that, similarly, objects — or images — provide a basis for learning and memory.”

We look at an object and think of the word it represents: the word “apple” pops into your head when you see Mr. Winokur’s portrait of an apple. That his bright red apple is on an eye-popping green background is a nod to the intensity with which children experience color... “When I photograph objects, I present them out of context, isolated, divorced from reality,” he said. “I think the intense color of my work makes the artificial presentation even more so. The supersaturated colors make us see the objects in a different light: no longer ‘just’ objects but images to be considered, contemplated, dealt with.”

"There were few textbooks available to young students in the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, students would use blank books, more commonly referred to as copybooks, to copy their teacher's lessons entirely by hand. Many of these early books were made by hand, until the local stationers eventually began supplying ruled and plain copybooks, often with advertisements on their wrappers.
My photos of the penmanship copybook shown above are from a 2008 exhibit, 350 Years of Books for Children at the University of Washington's Suzallo Library. Penmanship exercises were a common form of copybooks."