Notebook

Last month, all of us here at Fathom were busy wrapping up 2016's projects, not the least of which was our second consecutive semester teaching Information Design: Exploration, Navigation, and Understanding.

This is a transcription of the fourth episode from our Especially Big Datapodcast. You can listen to the episode here.

Education sits at the core of what we do. Our focus on education is about accessibility and opportunity: the more people with the power to prototype and build out their own ideas, the more innovation we will see. But it’s not just about teaching people to become the next Gates or Zuckerberg, it’s about giving people the skills and resources they need to share their unique contributions with a larger community. We do that by teaching code, in conjunction with design and storytelling, as a skill one can use to create.

Amidst all the attention given to the 2016 presidential campaign, it was easy to miss an important date in the history of women in American government. One hundred years ago, on November 7, 1916, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman to be elected to federal office when she won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

There’s a great scene in The Newsroom where a college student in the audience of a Q & A panel asks curmudgeonly TV news anchor Will McAvoy to give a reason why America is the greatest country in the world. After a few facetious half-answers about the New York Jets, the panel moderator coaxes McAvoy into a profanity-laced rant. Why is America the best? “It’s not,” McAvoy snaps. “There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world.”

Fathom is excited to have Charlie on our team as an intern for the semester, here from the University of Connecticut. Coming from a journalism and radio background, we asked him some questions about what brought him to Fathom and his memories of his first concert (among other things).

From trends in civic tech, to monitoring poverty in New York City, to understanding the future of business, we've been fielding more inquiries from organizations who want better ways to communicate the data in their research and reports.

We're excited to release the latest update to the Poverty Tracker. The project is a collaboration with the Robin Hood Foundation and Columbia’s Population Research Center that has continued to look at poverty and hardship in New York City over the past three years.

The Fathom team is excited to welcome Paul, our new designer and recent graduate from the Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. We asked him some questions about design and typefaces (among other things).

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.