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.
We recently organized the Mirador Data Competition, where participants were invited to explore public datasets in health, sports, and global development using the Mirador tool, submit their findings, and have a chance to win prizes. With the assistance of experts in the areas covered by the competition, we chose three winning entries, and today we have the pleasure to announce them.
Because of the immense popularity of All Streets, we expanded our product line, and created maps for individual states. To accommodate our new selection of products, Terrence worked feverishly to design the Fathom Print Shop. The site officially launched yesterday—just in time for the holiday season.
Public data is increasingly available from multiple sources: governments, economists, and research communities, to name a few. Open access is a fundamental prerequisite for civic participation and transparency, but freely-available and intuitive tools that allow users to extract meaningful narratives from the data are also crucial. That was our central motivation to develop the visualization tool Mirador, and also for the Mirador Data Competition we launched last month. The richness of public datasets is often extraordinary, and many of them are the result of the continued efforts of data collection teams, statisticians, and researchers over several years, sometimes decades. In this post, I would like to share some associations I found using Mirador on a large dataset of behavioral risk factors. These associations stand here simply as suggestive hints or directions that one can use to delve further into the data using more rigorous statistical analyses. This highlights the main purpose of Mirador as a visual exploratory tool.
In the last month, we built a tool that explores the global seismic activity occurring over a single year. The project integrates earthquake, population, and mortality risk data so that users can explore how the frequency and magnitude of earthquakes generates varying levels of risk around the world. Visit the site: fathom.info/quakes
Daily diets vary considerably around the world—and the food we eat often mirrors the wider structural circumstances of the places we live in. Whether influenced by strained foreign relations, growing economies, fluctuating market prices, or shifting environmental conditions, the food we consume depends on where we live. What the World Eats, our latest piece for National Geographic’s Future of Food series, compares national diets and consumption patterns across a variety of countries over the last 50 years.
Just ran across this photo of Darcy Bowden, my high school “Production Art” teacher, during a brief visit to Fathom last summer. Her class was a two-hour studio that I was able to take both my junior and senior year—my first exposure to real graphic design exercises (creating black and white ink drawings of concepts like “contrast,” or making artifacts in the style of other eras of design, and so many others...) and gave me a chance to build a portfolio that helped me get into design school. I'd wanted to take the class ever since reading about it in the course catalog as an eighth grader picking out courses for my first year of high school.
Today, in collaboration with Sarah Rinaldi, we released a video documenting Open India, an interactive visualization we developed for the World Bank Group. The video was showcased at the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG). The Annual Meetings bring together central bankers, ministers of finance and development, private sector executives, and academics to discuss issues of global concern, including the world economic outlook, poverty eradication, economic development, and aid effectiveness.
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.