The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 24

Mutual Muses was an open-source project hosted by Zooniverse that explored the correspondence between two important figures in the twentieth-century art world. Sylvia Sleigh was an American realist painter known for her portraits and, specifically, for her 1973 painting The Turkish Bath. Lawrence Alloway was an English art critic who is credited as the first person to use the term "pop art." Sleigh and Alloway began writing letters to each other in 1948, and they married in 1954. The Getty Research Institute's Digital Art History program digitized a number of letters that the two sent to one another between 1948 and 1953 and these letters have all been transcribed thanks to Zooniverse volunteers. As the team behind this project notes, these letters are not only a highly personal artifact of a couple's romantic entanglements, but also a unique historical resource that provides art historians with detailed and personal accounts of the lives and careers of these two important figures while also tracing the contours of the larger art movements with which they were associated. While the transcription portion of this project is over, these letters are accompanied by a number of contextualizing resources that may appeal to researchers as well as educators interested in using these letters in the classroom. These resources are available via the education tab. [MMB]

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For instructors and scholars of religious studies, the University of Calgary created this extensive list of web-based resources that may be of interest. This guide was created by Cheryl Adams, a religion reference specialist at the Library of Congress, and Saundra Lipton, a librarian at the University of Calgary. Visitors can explore this portal in a few different ways. On the resource guide's homepage, visitors can select a link that allows one to browse by religion. The collection includes resources related to over a dozen religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Taoism, and new religious movements. Alternatively, visitors may also browse the collection by thematic categories such as bibliographies/indexes, digital text collections, data/statistics, images, journals, and sacred texts. [MMB]

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PBS NewsHour Extra recently compiled this collection of five lesson plans designed to engage young learners with the invention process and how they can learn how to solve problems through innovation. As with all PBS NewsHour Extra lesson plans, each lesson centers on a contemporary issue and incorporates a clip from a recent PBS NewsHour episode. In addition, all five of these lessons introduce students to the MIT-Lemelson's InvenTeams program five-step model of the invention process. All five lessons are designed for high school learners and may especially appeal to science teachers as well as educators, librarians, and youth workers who facilitate makerspaces. In one lesson, which incorporates two recent NewsHour stories, students examine an existing medical invention or device and brainstorm ways to innovate upon that invention with the aim of helping individuals with disabilities or injuries. In another lesson, students learn about a robot designed to combat invasive lionfish in the Atlantic and design their own invention to stop invasive species. Educators are invited to share class inventions and innovations with PBS NewsHour via social media; check out #PBSInvention on Twitter. [MMB]

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The Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at the University of Richmond has created this digital humanities project that illuminates the forced migration of enslaved individuals in the American South between 1810 and 1859. This project features data from the Minnesota Population Center's National Historical Geographic Information System (IPUMS NHGIS) as well as passages from historical narratives, such as Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House and Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave. The Forced Migration of Enslaved People consists of four parts. The first is an interactive map that allows visitors to track out-migration and in-migration data across southern counties over time. In doing so, this map offers information about the slave trade in the South. The map also contains a series of pin marks that indicate locations described in historical narratives. By clicking on the pin mark, visitors can read passages from these narratives. To learn more about the slave trade and forced migration over time, visitors can use the timeline tool, which appears just below the map. As users select different decades, they will see migration statistics for that decade along with information about the location of cotton and sugar plantations. Finally, visitors can also view a bubble map (available in the data section) that provides a visualization of migrations in and out of a specific state or county. This project offers powerful insights into the violence of slavery. [MMB]

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For educators, youth workers, and anyone who works closely with young learners, Scientific American's Bring Science Home series offers a large collection of hands-on science experiments and activities. This series was initiated in 2011 and currently contains almost 400 science activities designed for children between the ages of 6 and 12. Visitors may browse by topic, such as health, sustainability, or technology. Each featured activity includes a detailed description of the procedure, accompanied by background information and links to related resources that may be of interest. One recently published activity, "Make Sprinkles Dance," engages learners with the concepts of sound and vibration using just a bowl, a rubber band, plastic wrap, and some colored sprinkles. In another recent activity, "Memory Surprises," participants test their ability to recall a list of words and a familiar object and learn about memory and cognition. New activities are posted every week, so stay tuned. [MMB]

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SURFACE (Syracuse University Research Facility and Collaborative Environment) is a digital repository of scholarship from faculty and students at Syracuse University, including scholarly articles, books, journals, dissertations and theses, conference proceedings, videos, and more. The database was launched by Syracuse University Libraries in 2010. As of this write-up, SURFACE includes thousands of articles and papers, which visitors may browse by discipline or by academic unit (where papers are organized by specific colleges, schools, programs, and libraries within the university). Alternatively, visitors may also conduct a search of this repository to find materials of interest. This collection contains materials relating to a wide range of academic disciplines, including business, engineering, education, medical and health sciences, and arts and humanities. Visitors may also browse open-access dissertations and theses produced at the university by year. [MMB]

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EveryONE is the community blog of the open access journal Public Library of Science (PLOS) ONE. This blog offers staff perspectives on publishing and open access developments and highlights the breadth and variety of scientific research published in PLOS ONE. In doing so, the EveryONE Blog may appeal to science researchers as well as those interested in open access publishing. One recent post, authored by PLOS ONE editors, highlights five recent PLOS ONE articles that feature research about microbiomes. Another recent post, authored by Deanne Dunbar, summarizes a recent PLOS ONE article by anthropologist Elspeth Ready entitled "Sharing-based social capital associated with harvest production and wealth in the Canadian Arctic." Visitors may browse blog posts by tags such as blog pick of the month, citizen science, and ask EveryONE. [MMB]

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Last discussed in the 11-04-2005 Scout Report, Folkstreams is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving independent films that "focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities." Folkstreams was founded in 1999 by filmmaker Tom Davenport and is partnered with iBiblio.org, the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and The Southern Folklife Collection, which is also at UNC. On the Folkstreams website, visitors can watch dozens of films, including documentaries and films that highlight musical performances and other forms of art. Visitors may browse these films by category (including African-American culture, arts & crafts, foodways, rural life, urban life, and much more) or by region (e.g., Appalachia, Northeast, Pacific Northwest). The collection also features three films from outside North America. Alternatively, visitors may also browse by filmmakers. Educators will find a handful of lesson plans and worksheets that may be of interest via a link at the bottom of the website. [MMB]

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The Buenos Aires Review (BAR) is a bilingual, digital publication that seeks to highlight "the best and latest work by emerging and established writers from the Americas, in both Spanish and English." Edited by an international team of writers and scholars, BAR features poetry, short fiction, interviews, essays, and reviews. In addition, BAR publishes translations of essays and literary works originally penned in languages other than English and Spanish. In fact, the conversations section of BAR features translator's notes, which are reflections on the craft of translation. Visitors will find the most recently published features on the site's homepage. As of this write-up, recently published works include two poems from acclaimed U.S. poet Ada Limon; an English translation (courtesy of Qiaomei Tang) of a poem by renowned Chinese poet Zheng Chouyu; and an excerpt of fiction by Argentinian writer and scholar Carlos Gamerro. Most titles featured in BAR are accompanied by the city where the writer lives. In addition to browsing works by genre (e.g fiction, poetry, thoughts), readers may also browse works by city. [MMB]

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Cartography enthusiasts will want to delve into Maps That Changed Our World: an Esri Story Map created by Julie Stoner, Rodney Hardy, and Craig Bryant of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. This story map is a digital interactive project that highlights a handful of fascinating maps created over the past several centuries. Maps that Changed Our World starts by introducing visitors to Claudius Ptolemy who, in his 150 CE textbook Geography, detailed the world as he knew it using mathematics and knowledge of early civilizations. In 1482, Jacopo d'Angelo and Nicolaus Germanus created a physical map that represented Ptolemy's text, which visitors can view in this story map. Other featured maps include Muhammad Ibn al-Idrisi's 1157 map of the world as compiled in 1928 by Konrad Miller; the 1457 Genoese world map; Gerardus Mercator's 1569 map; and much more. [MMB]

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Created by comic book retailer Aydin Kwan and self-described "library person" Le Button, the Queer Comics Database highlights dozens of comics (both web-based and print) that feature LGBTQIA characters. Originally created as a capstone project for the University of Washington's iSchool, the Queer Comics Database currently features 146 titles, including comics for children, young adults, and adults. Visitors can browse this database by creator or series and apply filters for audience (e.g., teen, middle grade, adult), genre (e.g., action, historical, superhero), and series type (e.g., free online, series, stand-alone). In addition, readers can filter by tone (including bleak, irreverent, and silly), by art style (including black and white, manga/manhua/manhwa, mixed media) and by queer representation. Each entry in the Queer Comics Database features a synopsis and available reviews, allowing readers (as well as educators and librarians) to find titles of interest with ease. [MMB]

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From the University of California Los Angeles comes this collection of over 1,800 children's books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As noted in the introduction to this collection, the mid-eighteenth century was marked by new views about childhood and education: for the first time, many educators appealed for greater consideration of children's distinctive needs when the notion of pleasure in learning was becoming more widely accepted. This collection is perhaps best browsed by year - doing so offers a glimpse into how English-language children's literature has evolved over the course of time. Some of the earliest books in this collection, such as The Young Lady's Parental Monitor (1792) and A token for children: being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths, of several young children (1795), are intended to be instructional in nature, centering on themes of religion and morality. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century titles feature fairy tales, poetry, and the earliest picture books. Visitors can also browse this fascinating collection by topics and subjects such as animals, nursery rhymes, and obedience. [MMB]

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For Scout readers with a connection to the Golden Gate City, Where the Streetcars Used to Go is an interactive map that features San Francisco's streetcar routes of yesteryear. Created by Chris Arvin, this map allows visitors to view San Francisco's streetcar routes in the years 1940 and 1960. As visitors explore this map, they can also view a number of historic photographs depicting streetcars, courtesy of a number of sources including the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and OpenSFHistory. In addition, the 2020 map depicts the few streetcar routes that are still in operation today. [MMB]

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The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London has an incredibly varied collection of artifacts that span 5,000 years and includes architecture, furniture, clothing and textiles, sculpture, painting, jewelry, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, and of course, photography. The V&A has been collecting photography since the very beginning of the medium in the mid-nineteenth century and its collection is especially strong in the work of early photographers. This is in part because approximately 270,000 photographs from the collection of the Royal Photographic Society, as well as camera equipment, books, and photographer's journals, was transferred to the V&A in 2016. The V&A plans to open a new Photography Centre in October of 2018, making this website the best way to currently view its photos. A few examples are presented here, such as a 1953 official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton, or one of MIT professor Harold "Doc" Edgerton's milkdrop photos. A great way to get a glimpse of the V&A's photographic riches is a short video narrated by several photography curators, "Introducing the photography collection," and a feature including video and images of early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. [DS]

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Smuxi is a cross-platform multi-protocol messaging program. While it was initially written for IRC, it now also supports Twitter, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, and Campfire as well. In addition to a traditional single-application mode, Smuxi also supports running a back-end engine separately from the front-end user interface. The front-end and back-end need not be run on the same computer. More technical users will often run the back-end on a small, always-on server (e.g., cloud hosting or a raspberry pi). In this client-server mode, message history and open tabs are synchronized across all connected front-ends, resulting in an experience similar to Slack. Smuxi's hook system allows users to write extensions in the scripting language of their choice. A number of community-supported extensions are available in the Smuxi-hooks GitHub repository. Smuxi is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License, with source code available on GitHub. Smuxi is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. [CRH]

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Some tracking software monitors users simply by encoding tracking tokens as part of the URL on which users click. These tokens serve no purpose other than tracking and can frequently be removed with no ill effects. Among the most common of these tokens are the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) tokens. These were initially popularized by Google Analytics predecessor, Urchin. Currently, they are used by a number of other tracking tools including Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and others. The Tracking Token Stripper is a browser extension that detects these tokens and removes them from URLs prior to loading a page. Not only does this help to defeat user tracking, it also results in shorter and "more aesthetically-pleasing" URLs. Tracking Token Stripper is a free software, distributed under the MIT License, with source code available on GitHub. Tracking Token Stripper is available for Google Chrome via the Chrome Web Store and for Firefox via Firefox Add-ons. [CRH]

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The National Archives and Record Administration's Giphy.com page is home to almost 300 GIFs created using historic footage in their collection.

Do you have something to say that may be best expressed by a GIF of John F. Kennedy giving a speech or with vintage footage of the original Superman television show? History enthusiasts and GIF lovers alike will appreciate the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) Giphy.com page. Giphy (featured in the 07/01/2016 Scout Report) is a free online tool that allows anyone to quickly and easily create a GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) using video footage of their choice. NARA, of course, is home to a great deal of rare video footage and has created this collection of GIFs using this footage. NARA notes that its collection includes "animated history of all flavors including major historical events, celebrities, national parks, newsreels, animated patents, and dancing sailors." Animated patents are GIFS created by using two photographs, usually of an individual or event recorded before moving picture technology. Thus, a Walt Whitman GIF is possible and is included in this collection. To learn more about images and footage included in this collection, visitors to this page should be sure to check out NARA cataloging information by clicking on the link just below each GIF.

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