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.
Fall is here, and the Fathom office is back in full swing teaching its second semester of “Information Design: Exploration, Navigation, and Understanding.” In the spirit of the very process we teach, we took a chance this summer to do some self-reflection as instructors, iterate and refine our ideas, and update a few assignments, lectures, and activities to make the course even more engaging and informative for the students.
A transcription of the second episode of our Especially Big Data podcast.
A transcription of the first episode of our Especially Big Data podcast.
We recently had the pleasure of working with Lukas – an architecture student at Princeton. While hanging out with us this summer, Lukas continued his work exploring the idea of “One Minute Architectures.”
This is a transcription of an episode from our Especially Big Data podcast for those of you who prefer words on a page instead of words in your ears. Enjoy!
This summer I researched and analyzed data, learned how to code in p5.js, and participated in the iterative workflow of Fathom. Additionally, I took a trip to the aquarium on my second day of work, practiced building Ikea furniture for the new office, and (unsuccessfully) tried to convince everyone that crumpets are delicious.
Welcome Parima! It’s not often we have high school interns, but Parima was an exception. She learned about us through Girls Who Code after a visit last summer. Over the past two weeks she has been on turbo learning a lot about visualization, information design, and web programming. She even made a pull request fixing a bug in the No Ceilings dataset. It was a pleasure having her. Read more about Parima in her own words.
Alas, we've released another episode of our podcast, Especially Big Data. The episode, Let's Hear it for the Girls, dives into the many factors contributing to the dearth of women in tech-- most of which are not captured in numbers.
This year, Fathom celebrated Pi Approximation Day one of the best ways we know how-- by sharing our love of coding and technology with a visiting Girls Who Code group!
Last week we launched a project with ProPublica that investigated the hundreds of innocent people in Houston, Texas, who have been wrongfully convicted for drug crimes since 2003. You can gain some background on the piece, "Busted," in Elaine's recent blog post. Like most of our projects, though, much of the story lives in the details.