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.
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Launching Myriscope, providing ConText for the Mueller Report, and visiting the Mayo Clinic
In the last decade, we’ve waded through lots of talk about data—and worse, Big Data—as a kind of frightening “other.” Bruce Schneier described data as “the exhaust of the information age,” which is perfectly apt—but this is usually read the wrong way, giving us an excuse to treat data as a kind of artificial nuisance. We’re led to see data as an abstract, inhuman thing stored in the cloud, or maybe just in the computer.
I personally have long been fascinated by textile arts, and as a studio we are always looking for ways to explore data-driven designs beyond the computer screen. The 1:1 comparison of pixels to stitches has been widely explored, but it wasn’t until recently that our studio had the means to explore it ourselves.
For a recent sketch here at Fathom, we tackled a typical visualization challenge: how should we connect a set of dots? Typically, you can do this with straight lines or arcs, and for more graceful lines you can use a Bézier curve. We built a tool to explore the possibility of customizing those curves in pursuit of both aesthetics and legibility. In the end, we liked the tool so much that we decided to turn it into a Bézier Playground to share.
Making sense of survey data, deconstructing Mueller documents, and geeking out about Bézier curves
Our work over the past year has, as always, spanned various domains (healthcare, finance, politics, and farming) and has taken many forms: internal tools for our clients, web apps for the public, and touch screen installations.
There’s nothing more captivating than the righteous indignation of an aggrieved restaurant Yelper. Like happy families, five-star reviews are all the same, packed with praise for “heavenly” flavors and “friendly” waitstaff. But scroll down further, past the tepid three- and four-stars, and suddenly each reviewer seems miserable in their own way.
Mark and I were lucky enough to be invited as guest lecturers at Harvard’s CS171 Data Visualization course again this semester. We love being able to share our work outside of the office, especially in classrooms where students have the opportunity to ask questions. We covered some of the most frequently asked questions last year, but there were some new ones this semester.