Notebook
Here's where we post periodic updates on what we've been up to at Fathom. Reflections on the interesting stories that emerge from our client work, side projects, after-hours rabbitholes, and other miscellaneous threads of inquiry.
Some of us at Fathom are easily sucked into geeky hobbies. When I first came across a site dedicated to SDR, or software defined radio, I turned my desk into a makeshift communication outpost for several days to learn the basics. It turned out to be surprisingly relevant to our core interests of data visualization and programming.
The social–sharing experience is a crucial and often overlooked element of information design. In addition to updating content and the UI/UX of our latest No Ceilings site, we are constantly developing its "shareability." Between deep linking, bite-sized graphics for stories, and pre-populated social links, we have made sharing as easy and visually compelling as possible.
From the start of their education to the prime of their careers, women's professional paths look rather different from their male colleagues. The extent to which workplace inequity influences women's careers, though, varies by locale in a way you may not expect.
One in four girls worldwide marries before her 18th birthday. Child marriage violates basic human rights, and denies millions of girls worldwide the control over their health, education, and futures. One of the data-driven stories featured in No Ceilings, our latest project for the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation, details the prevalence and negative impacts of underage marriage, along with the detrimental effects it can have for girls, their families, and their wider communities.
Scaled in Miles was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. The show's producers had an interest in the role of album covers from the days of 12" LP's, and their counterparts in the digital age.
No Ceilings, our latest project for the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation, features a myriad of data-driven stories on the global progress of women and girls over the last twenty years. Cutting across gains in health, education, economic participation, leadership, security, and communication, the stories reveal areas that have experienced the greatest improvements, as well as places where the gaps remain. In the vein of women’s leadership, No Ceilings features a dichotomous story on women’s political participation: while women often vote at comparable rates to men, they are often under-represented in positions of national government.
In conjunction with International Women's Day and the upcoming session of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women, we're thrilled about the launch of No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project. Despite gains over the last twenty years, we still haven't reached gender equality worldwide. The gap in the share of women in the workforce versus the share of men has barely changed in two decades. To make matters more grim, the United States is one of nine countries worldwide that doesn’t provide for paid maternal leave.
One of the great things about working at an information design firm like Fathom is the opportunity to work with subject matter from all kinds of domains. In a single week, we've researched topics ranging from social issues that affect women's equality, database management, and student debt. Recently we were even pulled into the vortex of an international cartographic mystery...
Since its initial launch in the spring of 2014, we've recently finished updates to the Poverty Tracker. The tool, built with Robin Hood, shows how the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) underestimates the number of New York City residents suffering from financial poverty, material hardship, and health challenges. The recently developed Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) gives a more accurate depiction of what it means to live in poverty by considering location, modern-day spending habits, and varying sources of income. The latest update incorporates new survey results from Columbia University and Robin Hood to show how poverty is related to health and neighborhood services.
Last week, some of us here at Fathom had the privilege of attending the Massachusetts Conference for Women, where we saw Secretary Clinton and Lupita Nyong'o speak.