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.
Being home for Thanksgiving always gives me a huge sense of nostalgia. My family inevitably winds up rehashing the past, including many entertaining stories of my childhood growing up in the '80s. One story that came up again this year was about me being sick with mono in the third grade. I was home from school for over three months, though I don't really remember being all that sick during that time. I actually remember it as one of the best times of my life. I got to stay home from school, lie on our tweed-upholstered barcalounger, and watch soap operas and TV reruns all day. Although I probably missed some critical developmental education, I think it was a worthwhile trade-off for my extensive mental database of useless TV trivia and '80s pop culture knowledge.
At the Remediating the Social conference a couple of weeks ago, Israeli artist Romy Achituv presented a data visualization project of the books in the Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers in South Tel-Aviv. A unique element of this library is the use of emotional judgments from the readers to organize the books. This project resulted from a collaboration between Romy and me, where the main goal was to create a working prototype of a Web-based visualization of the "emotional history" of the books.
During my senior year at Savannah College of Art and Design, I took Language, Culture and Society with Désiré Houngues. Two cultural insights about language stuck with me. In some societies men and women speak with entirely different vocabularies but still communicate verbally with one another. The second was that some languages only have two words for color, white and black (light and dark); if a language includes a third color, it is always red. This led me to research by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist. They made the first hypothesis about how color terms enter a language in a certain order. Later, I came across the World Color Survey, which was established in an effort to continue research into Berlin and Kay's hypothesis. The WCS makes their data available to the public, and I found that this was exactly what I needed to help answer my many questions. The result of the WCS data exploration is below, where about 800,000 individual color chips are grouped by the terms used to describe them.
Yesterday, Kristen Coogan, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Boston University brought her Information Design class in for a tour of our office and some Q&A. After braving the cold and long voting lines I made it in to greet them at 10:00. Ben and I gave them a brief overview of the company and showed them some of our print work up on the 3rd floor.
Fathom offices thankfully emerged unscathed from last night's super storm, and those regions that weathered the worst are in our thoughts today. In the event that Sandy came farther north, we took precautions over the weekend to make sure our most valuable assets were taken care of:
An interview with Terrence and Andrés on their experiences at the AT&T Mobile Hackathon.
Ever since the spectacle that was the 2012 Summer Olympic opening ceremony, I’ve had an image of Sir David Beckham — captaining a jet boat down the river Thames delivering the Olympic torch while fireworks explode upon his arrival — as my desktop wallpaper. His face staring at me has been my daily dose of reality. It has challenged me to be a better person and shoot for excellence each and every day. I realize I can’t keep this inspiration all to myself, I need to share this majesty with the world, so you too can achieve more.
The good news is that our first run of All Streets posters got a ton of love this summer. The less good news is that we sold out of them, so James and Terrence ventured down to Connecticut yesterday to do press checks on the second run.
Our youngest data scientist has really evolved as an artist since we've known her, using the Fathom offices as a sometimes studio when she is not travelling. She is currently experimenting with large-scale figurative works on paper, exploring the tensions between data visualization and young adult folk iconography:
Here at Fathom we're all breathing sighs of relief, having just wrapped up a project that has been in progress for the last year or so. Sadly, you'll have to wait until January to see the fruits of that labor, but in the happy lull that comes after delivering a final product, we thought it was a good time to show off some other fun recent work!