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.
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:
Exactly five years ago, we launched Connected China. Irene Liu, who led the project at Thomson Reuters, unveiled it at a conference at 4PM EST, and the site was blocked in China by the time we showed up at work the next morning.
How do we quickly find what we know is there, and how do we efficiently explore what we don’t?
One of the biggest hurdles beginning farmers face in the US is access to land. The National Young Farmers Coalition came to us to help them build an “affordability calculator” that would let potential farmers understand funding and financing property of their own. They were looking for a partner that could build a tool from the ground up, one that went beyond a typical home mortgage calculator and took the complexity of farmland purchases into account.
Of a career spent interviewing and listening, Krista Tippett writes, “I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world.” Tippett has hosted the award-winning radio show and podcast On Being for the past 15 years, inviting guests from Janna Levin to John Lewis to Rosanne Cash into her studio for conversations covering everything from art and science to philosophy and faith.
In November 2016, we created First of Her Kind, a poster celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first woman to be elected to Congress and the first 94 women to be elected as Senators, Governors, and Representatives for each state.
Last week Mark and I had the opportunity to be guest lecturers at Harvard's CS171 Data Visualization course. It's always great to be able to get out of the office to talk with people about the work we're doing.