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.
As part of our exploration of ways to understand large document sets, we took a look at the Facebook ads funded by the Russian government between 2015 and 2017. They aimed to stoke tensions by targeting polarizing messages at both sides of controversial issues.
“Paying the President,” visualizing oral histories, and kicking off a summer of cell biology
As a studio with its fair share of computer nerds, we greatly enjoyed digging into the interview archive of the Computer History Museum. Using code, we extracted dates and entities from the 800+ oral histories to create a personal timeline for each interview.
This past June, Who Wants to be a Millionaire held open casting calls in Boston. My husband Nick was alerted through an online network of fellow trivia enthusiasts he’d connected with after his two-game run on Jeopardy in 2015. A modest crowd waited politely in the light rain outside of West End Johnnie’s, then filed in for a timed exam and the opportunity to win several oversized t-shirts featuring the Millionaire logo.
As part of our ongoing exploration into representing and understanding large document sets, we dove into the Computer History Museum’s interview archive. From the co-founders of Ethernet and Devo to professors at Carnegie Mellon, the archive includes 800+ oral histories of individuals involved in all aspects of computing over the last century.
We’re pleased to announce the launch of Finding Farmland, an “affordability calculator” we built with the National Young Farmers Coalition. Since access to farmland is one of the biggest hurdles for beginning farmers, the goal of the calculator is to help farmers understand the available financing options and enable them to create land purchasing scenarios.
We’re excited to announce the final launch of Finding Farmland, an affordability calculator we’ve built with the National Young Farmers Coalition over the past few years. Purchasing farmland can be incredibly complex, so we partnered with NYFC to create a platform that breaks down every step of the process. Check out the calculator here.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been making prototypes depicting entities and relationships in large sets of documents. Separately, we found ourselves reading more than we’d like to admit of the 312 page testimony of Glenn Simpson for the Senate Judiciary Committee, so we began deconstructing the document, using code to extract key people and places mentioned. Realizing that the testimony itself didn’t provide enough background information, we pulled in additional help to start making sense of the tangle of relationships.
While eagerly awaiting the Oscars, some of the movie buffs in the studio parsed through 20 years of Best Picture nominees. Rachel created a few sketches that look at the findings on movie budgets, viewer ratings, and race. For instance, this a breakdown of movies that push the 3-hour mark: