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.
Last Wednesday afternoon we noticed a massive traffic surge on the Fathom website, with all visitors loading one specific image of the All Streets project from 2008. How random! A quick glance at the referring page data showed us the cause: someone had come across All Streets and shared it on Reddit’s dataisbeautiful subreddit. And it was blowing up on the front page.
No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project is committed to using data as comprehensive evidence to measure the status of gender equality around the world. Our latest video for the Clinton Global Initiative uses data to demonstrate the progress of women and girls since the UN World Conference on Women in 1995. While the video gives a high level summary of CGI-related topic areas, we found it important to share a more granular, interactive version of the findings that fed into the piece.
Today we are announcing the Mirador Data Competition, the goal of which is to make discoveries in large and complex public datasets. The good news is we have been developing a program to help you make these discoveries, it's called Mirador.
We’re thrilled to announce our latest project for the Clinton Foundation’s No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project. The video, released this morning at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), outlines advancements and setbacks of women and girls over the last twenty years, with particular focus on their access to education and economic participation.
What began as a quick presscheck turned into spending the day with Elias Roustom, the Master Printer of EM Letterpress, who is making our new business cards.
I had some early experience with the problems of a well-tempered scale. Within a few months of learning guitar, it seemed some chords just didn't sound good unless the guitar was tuned especially for them. This got me interested in the way harmonies and scales are constructed from pitches and frequencies.
Continuing our fascination with color naming across cultures, we set our summer intern, Malika Khurana, on a journey to discover new colors. Color naming, no matter your language, is a verbal process. So one of the driving interests was to see how this could be integrated into a mobile app using speech recognition. In this post, Malika retells her adventure.
This is a post by Lee Cusack, our summer intern and recent graduate of Lesley University’s College of Art and Design. We’ve had an awesome time working on a project with him that sheds light on making face-to-face *conversation* universally accessible. (Photo captions by Terrence)
This year we held a mini-conference in Portland, Maine with local friends and neighbors Sosolimited and Design I/O for an opportunity to review projects, exchange ideas, and share working methods.
In June we released Mirador, a tool for visually exploring complex datasets, enabling users to infer new hypotheses from data and discover correlation patterns. Mirador is a collaboration between Fathom and the Sabeti Lab, which is part of the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University.