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.
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.
Roughly five years ago, James Grady, a designer at Fathom, settled down on his couch to watch a movie. It wasn’t just any movie, but James isn’t just any movie fan. Inspired by Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp, which lays out the patterns typical to stories that inform our culture, he wanted to see how the structure played out across all six Rocky movies. James got his spreadsheet ready, prepared snacks and drinks to see him through, and pressed Play.
Here at Fathom, education and access to technology are huge priorities. This informs many of our efforts, from the classes we teach, to hosting guests visits from groups like Girls Who Code, to our work with the Processing Foundation. Bringing clarity to complex ideas and difficult explanations is core to what we do.
It’s been a busy couple of months, and we finally found the time to write about it.
Over the last year, we’ve been working on ways to understand very large document collections—hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents. We began using Wikipedia as a source collection because it has millions of documents, but it’s also an openly available resource representing a vast range of recorded knowledge. It’s huge, it’s free, and we’ve always been curious to learn the breakdown of what’s being documented. What receives the most attention?