Big Announcement the First: Rowboat
In September, we publicly launched Rowboat — a new tool for making sense of tabular data that draws from our years of experience building custom platforms for understanding complex datasets.
A core philosophy behind how we approach our work has always been that data is only useful if it’s understandable. That sounds exceedingly obvious, but there is often a massive disconnect between collecting information and being able to communicate that information to others.
Our projects involve a lot of long detailed conversations with our clients — experts in their fields — to make sure we (and they) understand exactly what they have and what they want to do. We end up getting really deep in the weeds, but long before we get to that point, we always need to take a step back and see the big picture of what we have in front of us.
Years ago, we started building a tool that would let us get a quick sense of what’s in an unfamiliar dataset without needing to devote large chunks of time to running exploratory queries. We would pick it up, then put it down, then pick it up again as needed, but the goal was always to have a fast and simple way to get an overview of what’s happening in a dataset, and then quickly navigate through that overview to start exploring: What are the first trends that emerge at a glance? What’s missing or unusual? What’s relevant and what’s just noise?
And then two years ago, we picked it up and didn’t put it down. There’s not a lot out there that services the nebulous land between data science tool and direct-to-visualization-do-not-pass-GO kit — so we started building something for ourselves.
We focused on making the data tool that we wanted to be using in our own work and arrived at Rowboat — a tool built around the idea that interacting with your data in real time changes how you’re able to understand it. We also wanted a data tool that people actually enjoy using, and would reach for first when starting to work with a dataset. We’re incredibly excited about what we’ve built so far and where we want to go from here, but as we continue to refine Rowboat, we want our community of users to be part of the conversation about where we go next.
If it sounds like Rowboat would be helpful to you, we encourage you to give it a try. We would love to hear more about the types of datasets you’re most interested in unpacking with Rowboat and any new features that would help you achieve your data dreams. We hope you reach out to us at hello@rowboat.xyz and let us know what you think!
Big Announcement the Second: Introducing Delphy!
This summer we launched Delphy — an incredibly fast and powerful tool for rapidly generating and exploring phylogenetic trees. After years of not being able to speak about it publicly, we’re so excited to finally have it out in the world!
In contrast to existing tools for "Bayesian phylogenetic inference," Delphy does not require users to have any specialized technical knowledge to engage with the tool (or a particularly powerful server to run it). As a web-based tool, it requires no installation and any data run in Delphy remains entirely local to the user’s machine. A significant level of analysis can also take place within the tool itself — after uploading a file, users are able to monitor the run in real time and then dive right into lineage and mutation explorations as soon as the tree stabilizes (which usually takes just a few minutes).
All of this amounts to a tool that dramatically broadens the range of people who are able to work directly with phylogenetic trees. Clinicians and public health officials who don’t have days or weeks to run a tree — who are required to keep their data secure and who don’t have the technical know-how to set up and run complex queries — now just need an open browser to get started digging into their sequencing data.
We look forward to Delphy’s speed and ease of use becoming a game changer for clinicians and researchers looking to shorten the gap between data collection and implementing outbreak response efforts. As we head into 2025, we’re actively working to find ways to integrate Delphy into our ongoing work with the Sabeti Lab developing platforms for tracking and understanding pathogens in an effort to be better prepared for future outbreaks.
Of course, none of this would be possible without the one and only Patrick Varilly, our ever-inspiring collaborator who built the backend core of Delphy and who remains an invaluable resource as we continue to expand Delphy’s capabilities.
But wait — there’s more!
A year or so before the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we began our ongoing partnership with the Sabeti Lab to develop tools and platforms for pathogen surveillance — and our work in outbreak preparedness remains as vital as ever.
Rooted in our existing Lookout work, Banyan tools, experiments with publicly available pathogen data, and of course Delphy, we are thrilled to start pulling all the pieces together to create an adaptable pathogen surveillance platform for a wide range of public health, government, and research audiences.
We’re particularly excited about our partnership with the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases through our Sentinel work with the Broad Institute. Ben was invited to speak at ACEGID’s 10 year anniversary conference hosted at Redeemer’s University in Ede, Nigeria, and (after several long flights) was able to catch up with some of our long-distance collaborators in person.
Outside of our Sentinel work, we also had the opportunity to partner with Ginkgo Bioworks to develop a platform for collecting and analyzing multi-pathogen testing data to support one of their recently launched pilot testing programs.
From Austin to Paris, it was exciting to see Operation Outbreak simulations hosted around the world this year — with bigger groups than ever before!
Following our last round of updates, this year we enjoyed hearing feedback come in from the Operation Outbreak team as they coordinated simulations across the globe. We especially got a kick out of hearing stories from high school students who found many creative ways to work around the boundaries of the game — think overthrown governments and black market QR code vaccines. But that’s all part of the fun!
When designing the OO platform, we wanted to provide students with a flexible environment where they could mirror the real life decisions and trade-offs faced by public health workers in outbreak scenarios. We’re really happy with how OO simulations allow for imaginative problem solving when it comes to working through the operations and challenges of quelling a pandemic and we can’t wait to see what comes next!
But wait — there’s even more!
Ten years after the release of our Open India project, we reconnected with the World Bank Group! Inspired by what we were able to accomplish with Open India, a team at WBG reached out to us to develop a platform to help senior management teams quickly navigate through the vast amounts of data they’ve collected on the development projects they are financing across the globe. We look forward to continuing this collaboration into next year!
With everything going on this year, we were delighted to host a veritable army of interns to help see us through.
We put rising seniors Elissa and Andy right to work this summer — and they were more than up for the challenge. They quickly started contributing to our active projects and still found time to dive into some independent explorations as well. Elissa blessed us with an incredible blog post about her commute before she left, and Andy managed to get our long-dormant 3D printer back up and running for the first time in years.
We were sad to see them go… but recovered quickly when Andy agreed to join us full time starting next year! The man can do some great things with a frisbee — terrible, but great — and we can’t wait to have him back in the studio soon.
Luckily, we weren’t empty nesters for long. Laura let us drag her away from the sunny beaches of her home state of Florida to give us a fresh perspective on our public health work and Chase followed soon after, bringing his passion for ecological networks and an abundance of energy to our team.
Recently, Chase became our latest full time hire! We’re thrilled to have an endless supply of classic Chase Collaborations in our future. If you ever see him slow jogging towards you with a wild glint in his eyes, just accept your fate — it’ll be the time of your life.
Over at our Boston studio…
It was a year of rediscovering some of the best things about living in this city. From popping up to our rooftop to watch the sun set over the Charles, to tracking down the new location of our favorite burrito place (shoutout to Villa Mexico Cafe), to jumping right into the Celtics victory parade passing steps from our front door — even an MBTA shutdown or two (or three, possibly four…) couldn’t get us down.
Ellory (that’s me!) very kindly arranged for a tour of the paper conservation lab at the Museum of Fine Arts with the head of the department (Hi Mom!). Mother walked us through some of the treatments she provides to the paper under her care, gave an overview of a few common paper-making processes, and chatted with us about the broader philosophies and objectives behind conservation work as a whole.
We have no photo evidence of our visit, but Paul’s Lego recreation captures the scene well. Unnervingly well given that Paul was out sick and missed the field trip…
With the whole crew in town for a week this summer, we took the opportunity to visit the Boston Aquarium (and grab some cannoli from the North End). We’ve grown accustomed to incredible underwater videos of Hawaiian sea life from our offshore asset Kyle, so it was nice to get the chance to show off our corner of the ocean for a change.
This year’s attempt at a group picture (our perpetual white whale) came very close to full participation, but someone had to snap the shot, which brings us to…
…Mark
Allergic though he may be to the limelight, Mark can’t hide from our adoration for long. To honor his Fathomversary this year, we banded together to recreate the ever-consistent Mark Lunch™️ (complete with replica Mark Lunchbags™️) and joined him in his daily food intake ritual. It’s really all about the salad. And the yogurt. And the deeply unsafe apple slicing technique. We love ya Mark.
Teaching others (and ourselves) remains incredibly important to us.
This spring, Ben once again taught his Information Design class over at MIT, while Mark co-taught a class on data journalism with the Justice Media co-Lab at Boston University. We even managed to get Ben’s TA Geoffrey Mosoti Nyakiongora to swing by the studio for lunch to discuss some of his work thinking about sustainable design in architecture.
Kyle traveled to Portugal to eat fistfuls of pastéis de nata… and to give a talk at Elixir Con. Kyle’s presentation focused on how we arrived at the decision to use a Phoenix framework when constructing Operation Outbreak and how this played into our broader design and development process.
Kyle also joined Olivia (and longtime friend of Fathom Andrés), to give a virtual talk to a group of high school computer science students interested in learning more about the iterative processes and real-world decisions that go into bringing a complex design challenge from the initial sketch stage to final product.
We were very excited to see Katherine's Prose Play — an interactive exploration of poetry and wordplay — highlighted in a recent MIT Technology Review article focusing on the "HTML Energy" movement and the creative freedom and expression of modern HTML sites.
And of course, every few Fridays we like to have a member of our team teach us about a topic they're passionate about outside of the office. Just a few weeks ago, Chase gave us a thrilling presentation on research he conducted in Kenya last summer. We never knew how much we didn't know about ANTS!
We’re always on the lookout for more opportunities to engage with a wide range of students, teachers, and curious individuals - if you’re interested in connecting with our team, drop us a note at hello@fathom.info.
And on to 2025!
It’s been a long year — in our busy studio, and out in the world. This year more than ever, I truly appreciate how meaningful it is to be a part of a team that treats information with the consideration it deserves. I have always been blown away by everyone I get to work with here at Fathom and I’m incredibly grateful that my work days are spent surrounded by creative, intelligent, thoughtful people who care deeply about the work we’re doing. Even if most of them are monsters who don’t load the dishwasher correctly.
So in 2025, we’re going to keep working hard to equip public heath workers, clinicians, and researchers with the tools they need to face the next big pandemic. We’re going to move to social media platforms that better align with our values (bye Twitter). And we’re going to continue partnering with clients and passionate individuals who love tackling complexity with us.
If that sounds appealing, we’re always looking to expand our team of designers, developers, and data enthusiasts. We encourage anyone whose background and interests align with our work to reach out to us.
And with that, we’re signing off.
—Ellory and the Fathom Team
We’d love to hear what you’re working on, what you’re curious about, and what messy data problems we can help you solve. Drop us a line at hello@fathom.info, or you can subscribe to our newsletter for updates.