The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 38

The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA) in Washington, D.C., "seeks to inspire dynamic exchanges about art and ideas" through its focus on women artists. As part of this, the NWMA provides several thorough educator's guides, each developed in conjunction with past exhibitions at the museum. Each guide is downloadable as a PDF, and in them, readers will find digital images, lesson plans, classroom activities, and more. As an example, the most recently added educator's guide, "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today," contains eleven digital images, detailed lesson plans for both elementary and high school students, "gallery games" which may be adapted for classroom use, student worksheets, and grading rubrics. Another guide, "Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea," incorporates the NWMA's online exhibition A Global Icon: Mary in Context and other online resources, and also includes discussion exercises and instructions for a bookmaking activity. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Instructors and scholars in a variety of disciplines may be interested in Wiki Education, a nonprofit organization that "connects higher education to Wikipedia, ensuring that the world's most read source of information is more representative, accurate, and complete." Wiki Education offers multiple programs and initiatives to suit a range of needs and audiences. For example, their classroom program, Teach with Wikipedia, provides university instructors with tools and resources for assigning students to write a Wikipedia article (rather than, say, a research paper), thus enabling students to learn valuable research, critical thinking, and communication skills while also "contributing cited, well-founded information" to the internet. Educators may also want to check out the initiative's Future of Facts and Communicating Science. At institutional and organizational levels, Wiki Education offers the Visiting Scholars Program and Educational Partnerships, both of which provide opportunities for academic associations and university libraries and departments to share "reliable, vetted information about their discipline with the world." [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, the journal of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS), "aims to create a critical, discursive space for the promotion and exploration of 21st-century writings in English." Launched in 2012 and is currently in its sixth volume, this peer-reviewed journal publishes scholarly articles, as well as reviews and commentaries, on contemporary narrative works and forms such as novels, plays, and digital gaming. Examples of recent articles include "Chasing Death's Memory: Representational Space in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Wayne E. Arnold and "How 'the Old Stories Persist': Folklore in Literature after Postmodernism" by Sara Helen Binney. C21 Literature is published by the Open Library of Humanities with Katy Shaw, Professor of Contemporary Writings at Northumbria University, as its editor-in-chief, supported by an interdisciplinary editorial board from around the world. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

With the rise of the internet, Big Data has increasingly grown in scope, encompassing wide swaths of human behavior, as well as variations in Earth, environmental processes, and the intersection between the two. Researchers in this realm may be interested in Big Earth Data, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that "publishes research topics on 'big data' studies across the entire spectrum of Earth sciences." Here, visitors will find original research articles, as well as data papers with descriptions of datasets. Recent article topics include using the TimeScan concept to process large satellite-generated datasets, a review of technologies and emerging issues in big data applications to hydrology, and using Random Forest to map landslide susceptibility. Currently in its second volume, Big Earth Data is published by Taylor & Francis for the International Society for Digital Earth, a nonprofit organization that promotes "academic exchange, science and technology innovation, education, and international collaboration towards Digital Earth." [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

William Herle was a sixteenth-century spy and diplomat who worked on behalf of the court of Elizabeth I and left behind hundreds of letters, which are housed in libraries and archives throughout Britain. The Letters of William Herle Project makes this corpus of letters, which were previously unpublished and unedited, available in one place for the first time, offering those interested in early modern history a rich and fascinating resource. Readers will find searchable transcripts of over three hundred of Herle's letters, written to and from such prominent figures as William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester). This resource also contains a series of indexes allowing readers to browse the letters by criteria such as recipient and archival location, as well as a selection of images that "illustrate features of the material nature of these letters." The introduction section provides concise background information about Herle and his correspondence. Released in 2006, the Letters of William Herle Project was edited by Robyn Adams, Senior Research Fellow at University College London's Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and directed by Alison Wiggins, Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

From The Nature Conservancy comes Nature Works Everywhere, an educational website launched in 2012 to give "teachers, students and families everything they need to start exploring and understanding nature around the globe." Visitors will find over seventy resources for grades 3-12, ranging from interactive lesson plans to gardening guides, to virtual field trips with accompanying teacher's guides and student handouts. These resources can be filtered by fields such as grade level, Common Core standards, and theme. Readers will also find upcoming live online events, like virtual career fairs, as well as an interactive map showing the locations and statistics of more than 1,000 school gardens that are part of the Nature Works Everywhere community. Those interested in starting a school garden (or one at home) will want to check out the "design" feature, where users can create a plan for their garden and see an estimate of its environmental impact. Nature Works Everywhere also awards grants to K-12 public and charter schools "to support projects that implement green infrastructure to address local environmental challenges." [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Graduate students and postdocs in the sciences may be interested in myIDP (Individual Development Plan), a free career planning tool offered by Science Careers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This interactive planning tool is designed to help early-career scientists evaluate their own skills and interests, identify career paths that fit with their preferences, set specific goals to improve the skills needed for those career paths, and structure discussions with mentors to implement the aspiring scientist's plans. After creating a free account, users can save their progress through multiple self-assessment exercises and extensive lists of resources for exploring potential career paths. This tool helps new scientists navigate the often confusing range of career options and set themselves up for success. First launched in 2012, myIDP is based on the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology's Individual Development Plan for Postdoctoral Fellows. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Public librarians may find the Colorado Library Consortium's (CLC) Public Library Policy Collection of interest, particularly for those who are revising current policies. The goal of the collection is to "provide small, rural libraries with easy access to a clearinghouse of policies," and are collected from libraries from around the United States. Available policies range from community room usage, emergency closings, requests for public records, animals in the library, and much more. Visitors can conduct a keyword search or browse a variety of categories (e.g. policy type, policy name, or date added, to name a few). Policies can be downloaded as an Excel file, pdf, or can be directly printed from the site. Public library policies are submitted by completing a web form on the CLC site. This collection is an extremely useful resource for libraries that are writing new policies or revising existing ones, and would also serve as a good learning opportunity for students in the field of library and information studies. [JLB]

Comment on or rate this resource

From Stanford University comes Authorial London, a fascinating resource that is about "compiling and mapping references to London places found in the works and biographies of writers who have lived there." Here, readers may explore the literary geography of approximately 1,600 London place references in almost 200 works by 47 authors. The project features an interactive map with several base maps to choose from where users may browse and search by author (e.g. Charles Dickens), place name (e.g. Vauxhall), or work (e.g. Great Expectations). Users can also narrow their results by genre, form, time period, and social class. Authorial London enables readers to examine the city "from literary, geographical, and biographical perspectives," and both researchers and general audiences may find much of interest. This project is also "the first instance of a re-usable platform we call, 'Authorial {X},'" which is intended to allow the creation of similar projects for other locations. Authorial London began under the late Professor of English and Milton scholar Martin Evans, and is currently led by Kenneth Ligda and Karl Grossner of Stanford University. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Launched in 2013, the First Days Project is a community-based digital archive that collects and shares "stories of immigrants' first experiences in the United States." Here, readers will find over four hundred personal accounts of immigrants, refugees, and tourists from all over the world sharing memories of the beginnings of their experiences in the US as written stories, oral histories, and videos. Visitors can browse these stories via a map based on where people came from and where they initially arrived, and they can also browse a gallery of stories which can be filtered by country of origin, US state of arrival, and by year, with stories going as far back as 1939. Examples include an audio and transcribed interview with Isabel Loomis, who arrived in Washington, D.C. from Costa Rica in 1951 at the age of 17 and now lives in Seattle, and a written account by Ulrika Haglund, who traveled from Sweden to New York in 2014 at the age of 21 and now lives in Massachusetts. The First Days Project is presented by the South Asian American Digital Archive, a nonprofit organization led by Samip Mallick, who is the former director of the Ranganathan Center for Digital Information at the University of Chicago Library. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

State of the World's Fungi is the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens 2018 follow up to their award-winning State of the World's Plants website from last year. As this resource notes, the report is "the first of its kind outlining the state of the world's fungi, [...] highlight[ing] just how important fungi are to all life on Earth." The report and interactive website are organized into ten chapters, each accompanied by beautiful photographs and intriguing graphics. These range from New Discoveries (featuring 13 examples of the more than 2,000 new fungi species that were first described in 2017) to Useful Fungi (where readers can explore an assortment of ways that humans use fungi, such as in medicine, paper manufacturing, and leather processing) to Plant-Killers (featuring an interactive map showing the spread of ash dieback due to a fungal pathogen). Interested readers may download individual chapters or the full 92-page report as PDFs for additional text, graphics, and stunning photography. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Readers interested in queer history and culture may enjoy Wearing Gay History, "a digital archive of historical LGBT t-shirts." Visitors will find digitized collections featuring hundreds of t-shirts from LGBT archives across the US, (e.g. the Chris Gonzalez Library and Archives in Indianapolis) and some international archives (such as Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action in Johannesburg, South Africa). Wearing Gay History also features several online exhibits where t-shirts are used as documents, along with photographs, to explore various themes, such as "Queer Uncle Sam: The Politics of the Ballot Box and the Bedroom." Additionally, visitors may browse the archive as a list, by tag, or via a map, and they may also search the archive by keyword and a variety of fields. One of the goals of this project is to "[uncover] LGBT history outside the urban queer capitals of San Francisco and New York and in particular [highlight] the rich queer histories of the American Midwest and South." Wearing Gay History was founded in 2014 by Eric Nolan Gonzaba, a PhD student in American history at George Mason University. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Animation fans and educators may appreciate Life Noggin, a YouTube channel that uses short 2D animated videos to answer questions and offer explanations on scientific topics. In a style reminiscent of brightly colored 8-bit video games, Life Noggin bills itself as "an animated and educational web show designed to teach you all about your awesome life and the brain that makes you able to live it." Videos are typically three to four minutes in length, and their hundreds of episodes cover all manner of playful and serious topics, ranging from outer space (e.g. "Could We Build A Planet From Scratch?") to inside the human body (e.g. "How Exactly Do You Hear Things?"), and everywhere in between (e.g. "What Would Happen if All the Bugs Died?"). Each easily digestible video includes a lengthy list of sources in its description. Life Noggin was created in 2014 by Ian Dokie, Pat Graziosi, and Jared Oban and was nominated for a Shorty Award in the STEM category. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

The artwork of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, generally of a temporary nature and taking place on the grandiose scale of landscapes and entire buildings, can be difficult to describe to the unfamiliar. Fortunately, the artists' website offers readers ample views of the famous duo's massive projects. Under the artworks tab, visitors can see numerous photographs and sketched plans of the artists' works, including both their completed projects and those that were conceived but never came to fruition. Visitors can also read the artists' description of the work and its creation, and they will often find downloadable supplementary content and links to related sites. For example, Wrapped Reichstag (in which the entire Reichstag building in Berlin was wrapped in silvery fabric for two weeks) offers a PDF of the "Protocol of the Parliamentary Debate" (in German) and a link to an exhibition of documents leading to the project's creation. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a married team of American artists, originally from Bulgaria and France, respectively. After Jeanne-Claude's death in 2009, Christo has continued executing their shared visions, with the latest project, The London Mastaba, currently on display in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

The webcomic interviews with invertebrates is the brainchild of Sasha Seroy, a doctoral student studying the effects of environmental changes on predator-prey interactions in marine invertebrates at the University of Washington's School of Oceanography. Here, readers will find fifty (as of this writing) entertaining and educational comics primarily featuring marine invertebrates, such as pyrosomes (also known as sea pickles) and horseshoe crabs, but also terrestrial invertebrates, such as snails and hermit crabs. Launched just under a year ago, Seroy publishes a new comic every Wednesday. Each comic offers viewers imaginative drawings with witty dialogue that complements a scientific factoid in the comic's caption. Visitors to interviews with invertebrates will also find the occasional short blog post where Seroy shares links to relevant information about that week's invertebrate, and they can subscribe to be notified of new comics via email. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

The Courtauld Gallery's Beyond the Label presents extended information about selected works from its collection - information that would not necessarily fit on a typical exhibition label. For example, the entry for Edouard Manet's 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere includes a section entitled About this Work, which discusses the viewpoint Manet chose for the painting and the accuracy of his depiction of the barmaid's reflection. About the Artist provides a capsule biography of Manet and his place in the Paris art world in the late nineteenth century, noting that the painting was one of Manet's last major works before his death in 1883. There's also a section providing context, with contemporary writings about the Cafe. Points of Interest lays out some of the provenance of the work (purchased by Samuel Courtauld in 1926) and also includes links to some related works, such as photographer Jeff Wall's Picture for Women 1979, that shows a similarly-posed woman. [DS]

Comment on or rate this resource

Dat is a peer-to-peer platform for publishing datasets both large and small. Its design borrows concepts from distributed revision control systems, allowing multiple users to contribute changes and updates to a dataset while retaining authorship information and preserving older versions. Dat was initially funded by the Knight Foundation under an initiative that "seeks to increase the traction of the open data movement by providing better tools for collaboration." The Try Dat section of the project site contains a detailed tutorial that covers creating, publishing, and updating a dataset. Reference datasets are also provided in a number of formats, including a CSV on recent earthquakes, a JSON file of recently published DOIs, and Bionode format genomics data. The tutorial covers installing Dat on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Dat is free software, distributed under the BSD license, with source code available on Github. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

Beaker Browser uses the Dat protocol to provide a fully decentralized platform for publishing and accessing websites. Under the hood, Beaker uses Chromium (the open source component of Google Chrome) so it works with the majority of websites that work in Chrome. However, in addition to supporting the usual http and https protocols for accessing websites, Beaker can also access websites that were published as Dat datasets. Websites published in this way do not live in any central server. Instead, visitors all have a copy that they share among each other, with each visitor providing additional redundancy and bandwidth for the site. Beaker also includes a website editor and a one-click publishing system for creating new Dat-based websites. The take a tour link at the bottom of the home page contains a detailed tutorial on creating, publishing, and updating a decentralized website. Beaker is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Beaker is free software, distributed under the MIT license, with source code available on Github. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments was originally featured in the 8-7-2015 Scout Report, and it continues to enthrall with categories like "Sentient Sounds" and "Technological Chimeras."

In the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments -- which exists only online, under a Creative Commons license -- readers will find a panoply of imaginative inventions, from the Torturetron (from the film script of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) to Les Paul's Les Paulverizer. Readers may like to begin with the about section, which includes a fascinating exegesis of the site's undergirding assumptions, before moving on to the exhibitions. These include spectacles in the general categories of abstract resonators, acousmatic instruments, auditory extensions, giganticism, and others. Each instrument is accompanied by the textual or visual reference from which it was drawn and a concomitant image or explanation. This imaginative site must be seen to be believed.

Comment on or rate this resource