When I travel to conferences, I take sketchnotes that visualize and synthesize presentations and panels.  During the conference, I post photographs of the sketchnotes on Twitter along with brief comments about presentation content. After the conference, I collect all of the sketchnotes from the conference into a public Facebook album.  I find that I am more likely to return to these visual notes to remember past presentations than I might be to return to text-only notes.  They have also received more engagement on social media than the livetweets I used to use to record conferences. According to Twitter Analytics, the tweet below had 1,555 impressions and received 81 engagements. My most popular Tweet during a livetweeting session a few months earlier, while it had 1,072 impressions, received just 28 engagements.

In fact, several people have used my sketchnotes as visuals in blog posts about conferences. My sketchnotes’ popularity provides additional evidence of the prominence of visual communication in our digital world, whether that prominence stems from the human actors who like, share, retweet, or comment on the visuals or the non-human algorithms that select the visuals to be featured in feeds.

When I teach sketchnotes to students, I emphasize how the written elements of the page taking on a visual presence as students use the form to synthesize ideas.  Though the sketchnotes themselves are hand drawn, their combination of text and image and their success on social media, make them useful tools for communication in the digital realm.  Sketchnotes are, thus, yet another way that I make connections between print and digital media.

Click a link in the list below to be taken to Facebook albums from individual conferences.