I recently returned from my first trip to South by Southwest Interactive. Everything I had heard about being overwhelmed, excited, surrounded by incredibly smart and interesting people, and exhausted because choosing to haul that laptop around was a really bad idea? All completely true.

Although it’s difficult to distill general themes from a five day conference with over 19,000 registered attendees, my experience seemed to focus over and over again on data (visualizing it, organizing it, crowdsourcing it, opening it up to others) and people (designing for the best user experience, opening technology for public use, creating communities both virtual and physical and both professional and public).

Admittedly, these themes are probably due to how I selected panels. I’m a public historian/project manager/archivist who works primarily on GIS related projects. Data, particularly historic or geographic data, and how to view it are relevant to my work. Working on publicly accessible web-based projects like PhillyHistory.org and Muralfarm.org has also greatly influenced my interest in freeing data for public access and designing the best user experience. Still, I felt that several communities in the technology world are very focused on the idea of how to best use and manage the rapidly proliferating amount of data in a digital world.

Of the many presentations I attended, two really stood out.

Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization: Displaying just time based data is easy, as is displaying just geographic data. Displaying the two of them together is often a nightmare that leaves designers and developers looking for the nearest office item to throw against a wall. This panel provided excellent examples of how to handle the geotemporal visualization conundrum, a discussion which is continuing on the Geotemporal Viz blog. Azavea’s work on PhillyHistory and HunchLab faces the issue of time/space quite frequently, and I’ll definitely be reading more on this topic.

The 2011 Open Architecture Challenge: Revisioning Decommissioned Military Facilities: I’ve never been so glad that a session was full (sorry HTML5!). This presentation by Cameron Sinclair, the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, was inspiring. From a discussion of the Open Architecture Network to camel powered clinics to a design challenge to re-purpose decommissioned military facilities, the presentation provided ample evidence of their desire to “design like you give a damn.” By the end of the session, the audience was on their feet clapping and I was ready to give up public history to move to Haiti and help them rebuild schools.

While I had heard from many people that the conversations, the meet-ups, and the spontaneous lunches and dinners were more useful and enjoyable than the panels, I didn’t quite realize the truth of that statement until day two of SXSW. After the first day, I was on the fence about the conference. Then I went to the Librarians and Technology meet-up and I was sold. It was a great conversation that continued throughout the weekend at various lunches, core conversation sessions, meet-ups, and via Twitter. I’d strongly encourage any future SXSW attendees to use these official and unofficial casual events to meet people doing exciting technological work in specific fields, an opportunity that can be lacking from the overly large sessions and generally overwhelming size of the conference.

Sampling of Libraries, Archives & Museums Mashups, SXSW 2011 from Jon Voss on Vimeo.

I was fortunate enough to speak with Jon Voss, Danielle Plumer, and Michael Edson on a panel entitled Innovating and Developing with Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAMs). We had a great crowd for a 9:30am session and had an excellent discussion in the Q and A portion on everything from APIs to copyright to public access. I truly feel that the LAM community is facing technology issues head-on and will develop some creative, useful, and educational new innovations in the coming years. What other group would start compiling a list of LAM APIs over lunch in order to keep the conversation going? My slides are available here on Slideshare if you’re interested.

So what did I come back with? Along with a minor case of sleep deprivation and a new found love for blackberry cobbler, I have twenty pages of stream of consciousness notes I’m excited to review and links I hope to explore further. Perhaps most importantly, I’m invigorated by the discussions I had and enthusiastic about the possibilities available as libraries, archives, and museums expand their technology efforts and seek further options for innovative collaborations.