Nomic Atlas Quickstart

Learn how to get started with Atlas to structure your unstructured data.

Here you’ll learn how to set up your Atlas account, start uploading your own datasets, and how to build your first map.

Make an Atlas account

1. Visit Nomic Atlas to sign up for a free account.

2. Set up your Nomic Atlas organization. Your Atlas Organization stores any datasets you upload and allows you to invite collaborators to your datasets.

Uploading your unstructured dataset

Web Drag-and-Drop Upload

1. Go to your Atlas dashboard and click the “New Dataset” button.
2. Drag-and-drop your dataset in to create a new Atlas Dataset.

3. Name your dataset and select the data field you are indexing.

Note: The field you select for indexing will determine how Atlas organizes your dataset. It's usually the unstructured data field in your dataset like a text column.


4. Optional: Configure settings on your dataset to disable/enable topic modeling, duplicate detection and initial access permissions. You should be good to go with the defaults.
5. Time to index your dataset! Depending on the size and modality of your data, the indexing process may take anywhere from minutes for under 500k datapoints to an hour for multi-million point datasets.

API Upload

Those with knowledge of Python can upload data directly from their code. Walk through the steps below or jump directly into a 📓 Colab Notebook. Experienced developers may choose to go directly to our API reference or to our more advanced walkthroughs to get started.

Install Nomic package

1. Install the nomic library in your Python environment. Virtual environments are recommended.

pip install --upgrade nomic
2. Import the nomic library.

import nomic
from nomic import atlas

Log into Nomic

1. Get your API key. You can obtain your API key at https://atlas.nomic.ai/cli-login. Make sure you already signed into Atlas in your browser at https://atlas.nomic.ai/
2. Log-in to your Nomic account in your Python code (or your terminal) with your API token:

# in Python
nomic.login(YOUR_API_TOKEN_HERE)

# in the terminal
$ nomic login YOUR_API_TOKEN_HERE

Upload data and build map

1. Read your data file and map it in Atlas. For additional parameters for map_data, see the API reference.

import nomic
from nomic import atlas
import csv

# Edit accordingly if working with other data type (TSV, JSON, JSONL)
with open('my_data.csv','r') as f:
    reader = csv.DictReader(f)
    my_data = [row for row in reader]

# Build a map using the map_data method
dataset = atlas.map_data(data=my_data,
                          indexed_field='text',
                          identifier='my-organization/my-first-map',
                          description='A description of the data.',
                          )
dataset.maps[0] # to view map build status
2. All done! Visit the map link to see the status of your map build. Read more to see what you can do with your map next.