The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 23

Last discussed in the 06-10-2005 Scout Report, NASA's Solar System Exploration website continues to offer a number of engaging ways to learn about planets, dwarf planets, moons, and other celestial bodies that make up our solar system. This sleekly designed and frequently updated website - featuring stunning photographs, detailed diagrams, educational resources, and a number of interesting interactives - was recently awarded a Webby Award for Best Science Website. Visitors may want to start by exploring NASA's profiles of planets, moons, and other solar system occupants, which are organized through a series of tabs at the top of this webpage. For instance, the solar system tab includes profiles of the sun and Kuiper Belt, while the small bodies tab features information about meteors and comets. These profiles feature top ten lists, photographs, diagrams, and much more. Visitors should also be sure to check out the more tab, which includes links to NASA interactives (including, for example, the Mars trek, which allows visitors to explore the red planet on their computer) and kids, a collection of hands-on activities for young scientists. [MMB]

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Last January, 1,200 undergraduate students at Yale University signed up for Professor Laurie Santos's seminar about positive psychology entitled "Psychology and the Good Life," making the seminar the most popular class in the history of the university. For those interested in learning more about positive psychology, Santos is teaching a course on Coursera called "The Science of Well-Being." This ten-week course, which begins on June 11th, is based on a spring 2018 semester Yale seminar and addresses topics such as meditation, growth mindset, and gratitude. As noted in the introduction to this course, "[t]he purpose of the course is to not only learn what psychological research says about what makes us happy but also to put those strategies into practice." In keeping with this goal, the course incorporates a number of weekly "rewirement" activities designed to help participants practice different positive psychology techniques. To take this course, visitors will have to create a free Coursera account. Interested individuals can audit this course for free. [MMB]

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From filmmaker Brady Harlan, the creator of Scout Report favorites Numberphile and the Periodic Table of Videos, comes Computerphile: a YouTube series that addresses all things computer science. On this YouTube channel, which is updated multiple times a week, visitors will find dozens of videos that may be of interest. Many of these videos incorporate interviews with a variety of experts. For instance, one recent video entitled "Current State of Quantum Computing," features an interview with Robert Smith, Director of Software Engineering at Rigetti Computing. In another recent episode, Ross Anderson of the University of Cambridge discusses the legal aspects of Bitcoin. Visitors can browse previous videos by themed playlists including neural networks; SGML HTML XML; the deep, dark web; and favorites. [MMB]

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For researchers and instructors of medieval European history, the Making of Charlemagne's Europe is a database of primary source material that provides insight into Europe under the rule of Charlemagne (768- 814 AD). This database, which was created by the Department of History and the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, has two main aims. The first is to "offer a single, unified database framework for the extraction of prosopographical and socio-economic data found in early medieval legal documents." The second is to "apply this framework to legal documents surviving from the reign of Charlemagne." This database provides information about over 4,000 charters, which visitors may browse by charter, agent (individuals and institutions involved in the charter), or places. For instance, in the browse by charter section, visitors can explore charters by filters such as transmission date and attribute/relationship type (e.g. "ecclesiastical offices and ranks" and "family relationship & kinship"). Researchers may want to start by reading Guide to Basic Queries, which is available on the site's homepage. Instructors may be interested in Early Medieval Charters: A Guide for Students, which provides a helpful overview of charters and their role in medieval Europe. [MMB]

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The University of Hawai'i at Manoa has digitized a number of journal articles, research papers, maps, letters, documents, and more. Researchers can explore these digitized materials at eVols. These materials include items relating to Hawai'i's geography, biology, and natural environment, as well as items pertaining to the state's history, arts, and cultural heritage. Some of these items are arranged in themed collections. An example is the Merrie Monarch Festival, which is an annual festival (initiated in 1964) that seeks to honor and preserve the art of hula. Visitors can browse the entire eVols collection by community (including Asia collection, geothermal, Hawai'i Gamelan Society, and newspapers published in English in Hawai'i), author, subject, or date (dated items range from 1596 through the present). Visitors should note that some items in the collection are labeled for individual research and use only. [MMB]

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The Auckland War Memorial Museum (also known as the Auckland Museum) is home to a number of items relating to the natural history, military history, and cultural history of New Zealand, including a number of items relating to Maori history. For educators and others interested in the museum's collection, the museum offers a materials and resources page. While a few of these resources are designed to be used in conjunction with a visit to the Auckland Museum, other resources may be used independently to engage learners with New Zealand wildlife, history, and culture. For instance, "He Purapura: Maori language game" is an interactive activity that invites visitors to learn words for taonga (treasures of Maori culture) and words related to Maori art. The game incorporates photographs of items in the museum's collection. Other activities in this collection engage learners with the marine life near New Zealand. [MMB]

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As part of Science Friday's Educator Collaborative series (check out the 10-13-2017 Scout Report), veteran science educator Marta Toran has created this lesson plan designed to engage middle school learners with the science of fossilization. In this hands-on, multi-day activity, students place chicken wings in plastic containers and observe how a variety of factors, such as air exposure and the type of material used to bury the wing, impact fossilization of the chicken wing over the course of several weeks. In addition, this lesson plan features a number of videos about the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California which illuminates why this site is home to so many fossils. In addition, this lesson plan includes a card game called "Fossilize Me!" which is designed to help students learn about the conditions necessary for fossilization. [MMB]

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For humanities scholars and researchers interested in the intersection of art and the public sphere, Public: A Journal of Imagining America is a "peer-reviewed, multimedia e-journal focused on humanities, arts, and design in public life." Launched in 2013, the journal is a publication of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, which is a consortium of colleges and universities that seek to promote publicly engaged scholarship. As of 2017, the journal was edited by faculty and staff at Syracuse University and the Syracuse University Press. The most recent issue of the journal is based around the theme "Digital Engagements." The issue features an article by Elena Foulis, a scholar of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University, about her digital oral history project Latin@ Stories Across Ohio and an article by Elizabeth Rush, a writer and Mellon Fellow who recently taught at Bates College, about creating a "collaborative digital archive" that documents climate change in Maine. Readers can browse past issues of this journal via two helpful data visualizations that are available from the explore the archive tab. These visualizations allow readers to locate articles of interest by using criteria such as keyword, geographic coverage, author affiliations. [MMB]

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The National Film Board (NFB) of Canada recently released Indigenous Cinema, an online collection of films directed by indigenous Canadian filmmakers. Indigenous Cinema currently contains over 200 films, which visitors can browse by year (as of this write-up, the collection features films made between 1968 and 2017), director, nation, or by subject (including education, nature and ecological knowledge, and indigenous language). This collection includes animated shorts, feature-length documentaries, and a wide variety of short films. Some of these short films are part of Vistas, a 2009 series of 13 short films sponsored by NFB and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). Students and educators may want to navigate to the education tab, which highlights cinematic works by indigenous filmmakers and includes an array of educational materials. Visitors have the option to select highlighted works toward the top of the page, but scrolling down will uncover a large number of teacher resources. Available items include study guides, webinars, learning bundles, and interactive productions and apps. [MMB]

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From the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at The New York Public Library comes Black New Yorkers - an interactive timeline that traces the history of black individuals in New York City from 1613 through 2000. Black New Yorkers incorporates a number of thoughtful essays and primary source documents that illuminate this history. The timeline consists of five essays, each of which addresses a specific historical era. In the first essay, "Slavery and Freedom: 1613- 1865," readers can learn about the lives of free and enslaved black individuals during this period and view legal papers, illustrated portraits, and an 1841 issue of African Methodist Episcopal Church Magazine. This essay also highlights the stories of a number of important black New Yorkers from this period. The other four essays address the experiences of black New Yorkers during the Reconstruction, the first World War, the Great Depression, World War II and the 1950s, and between 1960-2000, respectively. Another highlight of this project is the resources page, which features two digitized NYPL collections. The first is "Negroes of New York," a Works Project Administration survey that documented the lives of black New Yorkers throughout history. Project writers included Ralph Ellison and Claude McKay. The second is a collection of issues of The Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. [MMB]

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Readers interested in discovering new music or tracing the evolution of musical trends across time may enjoy Radiooooo, a streaming platform that allows listeners to travel across virtual space and time to listen to a "radio station" in a country and decade of their choosing. The five os are for the five continental landmasses included in the project: Africa, Eurasia, the Americas, Australia, and-- a bit surprisingly--Antarctica. Radiooooo was created by artist and DJ Benjamin Moreau, music producer Raphael Hamburger, and Anne-Claire Troubart, who currently directs the site. To use Radiooooo, visitors simply select a decade (from the 1900s through the present) and a country. Listeners may also select a mood (fast, slow, or weird). Once listeners make their selection, they will begin hearing music from their selected time period and country. In addition, users can create a multi-destination trip to create a radio station that includes songs from multiple decades and countries. [MMB]

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This new online exhibit from the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program investigates "the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries." Curated by a team of librarians, archivists, and other Harvard University staff, this collection features a number of interesting items that illustrate the history of education and print culture, including early textbooks and books annotated by famous authors. Visitors may want to start by peaking at the collection highlights section. Highlighted works include a text from 1878 entitled A Fonetic Furst Reader by T.R. Vickroy; a copy of the The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD., annotated by Hester Lynch Piozzi; and a 1697 "commonplace book" authored by John Hancock. Commonplace books were scrap-book type manuscripts that featured "short quotes, longer passages and transcriptions, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, and legal formulas." From here, visitors can explore additional items, which are arranged into three sections: Learning to read, featuring textbooks and books pertaining to the "science of reading"; Reading collectively, which includes items that illuminate the history of libraries and book clubs; and Reading on one's own, which contains several commonplace books as well as annotated texts. [MMB]

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Why did astronomers decide to designate Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006? What did dinosaurs really look like? What can we learn from Vladimir Nabokov's extensive collection of butterflies? If these questions pique your interest, check out AMNH.tv: a collection of videos created by experts at the American Museum of Natural History that address a wide range of scientific questions. These videos are arranged into browsable sections on the left-hand side of the homepage. Shelf life, hosted by AMNH curators, highlights a variety of interesting collections in the museum (including the aforementioned Nabokov butterfly collection), allowing scientifically-minded individuals around the globe to learn more about the museum's offerings. Dinosaurs and fossils, which features a number of AMNH paleontologists, illuminates how some dinosaurs evolved into modern-day birds. Other collections in ANHM.tv include space, science bulletins, and kid science. [MMB]

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This culinary-themed timeline was created by students in a "Foundations of Western Civilization" class taught by Utah State University professor Julia Gossard. Here, visitors can learn about major culinary trends -- including trends related to food, drink, feasts, and agriculture -- from the Ancien regime through the present day. For instance, one stop on the timeline, Enlightenment Desserts, notes the growing popularity of chocolate in Enlightenment-era Europe. Another timeline entry, "Fear of the Tomato in Italy," reveals that during the late eighteenth century, some Europeans grew to fear tomatoes because, curiously, a number of individuals grew seriously (sometimes fatally) ill after eating the fruit. The true culprit was lead, which was often included in fine dishware of the day. As the entry explains, "tomatoes would draw out the lead that was in their dish and would eventually poison" wealthy diners who ate from plates containing lead. Other entries address the Irish Potato Famine, the advent of processed cheese, and the invention of the chocolate chip cookie. [MMB]

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Landscape architect Martin Hogue recently published this interesting and detailed history of the picnic table for Places Journal (for more about Places, check out the 09-09-2016 Scout Report). In this essay, Hogue traces the history of the picnic table back to the nineteenth-century picnicking craze, portrayed in idyllic paintings such as Thomas Cole's 1845 A Pic-Nic Party. As Hogue notes, nineteenth-century picnickers usually used blankets in lieu of tables, although some picnickers (such as those portrayed in Jerome P. Thomson's 1855 painting A Picnick in the Woods of New England) would bring dining furniture outside with them to their picnic. In the early twentieth century, a number of designers sought to create a portable picnic table, eventually leading to the picnic table we know today. This essay is accompanied by a number of artworks, photographs, and sketches. [MMB]

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The State Library of Queensland in Australia presents this digitized version of selections from The Queenslander, the weekly summary and literary edition of the Brisbane Courier, published by the Brisbane Newspaper Company from 1866 to 1939. The showcase website features approximately 1,000 scanned covers and interior pages. Images can be viewed in a mosaic or grid pattern. Using the mosaic view, it's possible to browse the whole collection, while grid permits zeroing in by date, subject, creator, and even color. The grid display starts off with a timeline of dates followed by two tag clouds of weighted subject headings and personal names, and finally a band of color choices that are all clickable and will take the user to the relevant issue of The Queenslander. One of the larger headings is Women's clothing and accessories. Selecting this heading leads to a display of magazine covers and interior advertisements, including the illustrated front cover from December 4, 1926, that shows a smartly dressed woman in a cloche hat waving a kerchief at a biplane, as well as multiple interior pages advertising women's sewing patterns available by mail order from The Queenslander pattern service. [DS]

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Tropy is a photo library management tool designed with researchers in mind. It provides features for group photos in documents (e.g., for scanned images of multi-page works), to annotate or transcribe photos, add custom tags to photos, and more. Users can then use annotations, tags, and transcriptions to search their photo library and quickly find items of interest. In addition, Tropy can export data in JSON-LD format, or even into the Omeka S digital exhibition software. The Tropy website promises that users will be able to "spend more time using your research photos, and less time searching for them." The documentation section on the Tropy website provides a getting started guide and a number of suggested workflows for utilizing the software. Tropy is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Tropy is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, with source code available on GitHub. [CRH]

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q is a command-line utility that allows users to execute SQL queries in tabular format text files (CSV, TSV, and other such formats). Users wanting to accomplish this task without a tool like q would typically need to load the CSV data into database software of some kind. The examples section on the q website provides an analysis of website click-count data and an analysis of file sizes to determine the owner using the most disk space. Users less familiar with SQL syntax may find the more detailed tutorial section useful. q requires Python 2.5 or higher and can run on any platform where Python runs. Python 3 is not yet supported. Installers are available for Windows and Linux. q is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3, with source code available on GitHub. [CRH]

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The Story of Beautiful is a collaboration between the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and Wayne State University's library system. For readers interested in art history, this online exhibit highlights an ornate nineteenth-century room with a fascinating backstory.

The Story of Beautiful is an interactive website dedicated to a single room with a contentious history. Between 1876 and 1877, artist James McNeill Whistler took charge of decorating a London dining room for ship owner Frederick Richards Leyland. Whistler took the lead from ailing architect Thomas Jeckyll, who had designed ornate shelving units to display Leyland's collection of Chinese porcelain jugs. Unbeknownst to Leyland, Whistler drastically revised the room, adding floor-to-ceiling peacock patterns; Leyland was not pleased. So, Whistler added one final touch to the room: a mural of two squabbling peacocks entitled "Art and Money." Leyland hated the Peacock Room, but he kept the room intact and showed it off to visitors. In 1903, American art collector Charles Lang Freer purchased the Peacock Room and had it reassembled in his Detroit home. Leyland's porcelain collection was not included in the sale, so Freer collected his own ceramics to fill Jeckyll's shelves, including pieces from Syria, Iran, Japan, China, and Korea. On this website, viewers can take a virtual tour of both the London and Detroit renditions of the Peacock Room, examine over 400 individual ceramic items featured in the room, and view other archival material related to this spectacular room. Note that to view the virtual tours on the site, visitors need to use Google Chrome or have the most updated version of Adobe Flash.

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