The Latest from Fathom – April/May 2019
Launching Myriscope, providing ConText for the Mueller Report, and visiting the Mayo Clinic
Myriscope: a visual digest of scientific articles
Over the past year we’ve taken various approaches to mapping and making sense of large archives. Most recently, with the guidance of our resident astrophysicist, Fernando, we designed and built an easy way to skim research articles and get an intuitive sense of their content.
Myriscope collects figures and abstracts from arXiv and bioRxiv into a single feed to provide an overview of the latest literature. Prioritizing key components (abstracts, figures, etc.) helps users browse through the articles to quickly stay up to date.
Understanding the Mueller Report through word associations
From an illustrated poster to the intertwining timelines of Porfiry, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to sort out for ourselves all the pieces in the Trump/Russia investigation. With the report itself finally in-hand, we built ConText to understand how individuals and groups are referred to in the report.
The platforms allows users to select an individual, get an impression of why they are relevant through the words associated with them, and read the references in context.
“Design is the best means we have for making information useful — not just presenting it visually, but giving people ways to work and think with it.”
In a recent post, Ben wrote about the “four Cs” of design and data: Communicate, Consider, Condense, and Conceive. To illustrate these, he covers a range of old and new Fathom projects.
- The Poverty Tracker for Robin Hood uses information design to communicate a narrative that establishes an agreed-upon set of facts (top left).
- The Causality Network for Markus Covert’s Lab connects data in a way that hasn’t been possible before — enabling their team to consider a large number of data points and use them in a new way (top right).
- Connected China for Thomson Reuters condenses thousands of people, tens of thousands of connections, and a quarter million words of text into a seemingly simple app to explore and explain China’s power structure (bottom left).
- And lastly, a platform that treats a legal documents (i.e. a 75-page contract) as “living” documents to change how people think about the data itself (bottom right).
Around the studio
- We’re mid-way through our collaboration with the Mayo Clinic’s Innovation and Design team to reimagine medical records, and are taking a trip out there to gather feedback from providers and other stakeholders.
- We briefly lost Olivia to our newest studio attraction: the knitting machine. With a background in both engineering and design, Olivia created Processing sketches to create palettes from images and generate knitting patterns. Learn more about her experiments here.
We’d love to hear what you’re working on, what you’re intrigued by, and what messy data problems we can help you solve. Find us on the web, drop us a line at hello@fathom.info, or subscribe to our newsletter.
