The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 27

The British Library is home to well over 200,000 playbills that "list entertainments at theatres, fairs, pleasure gardens, and other such venues," offering historians a glimpse into popular cultural events of yesteryear. This collection includes playbills dating from the 1730s to the 1950s and documents famous works alongside "[l]ess well-known and even forgotten plays." The British Library recently digitized their playbill collection and launched In the Spotlight, a crowdsourced effort to transcribe this collection. As of this write-up, the project is in search of volunteers to identify the titles on these playbills so that they can be transcribed. In the process, volunteers have the opportunity to explore historic playbills from throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. In the Spotlight utilizes LibCrowds, the British Library's software for such citizen historian projects. The project features an active discussion board for participants who want to discuss transcription questions and to chat with fellow transcribers. [MMB]

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From UC Santa Barbara Library comes the Alexandria Digital Research Library (ADRL), which hosts the university's diverse collection of digital material. The ADRL originated in the 1990s as the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), which was dedicated to geospatial information. Today, the repository contains materials from all disciplines and includes "images, text, streamed media, and numeric and spatial data." Visitors can browse the ADRL by collection, contributor, format, or topic. One highlight of the ADRL is the Robert H. Peck Underwater and Coastal Californian Photographs Collection, which features over 2,000 photographs depicting the flora and fauna of coastal California, Baja Mexico, and Alaska streams. Another highlight is the ADRL's impressive collection of audio recordings, which includes over 8,000 musical recordings from a variety of genres. [MMB]

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Linguists use the term "ideophone" to describe words that are difficult to define or translate because they are best expressed through gesture or voice. Quechua Real Words is an "anti-dictionary" dedicated to ideophones in Quechua, a language family spoken by Quechua people in the Andes Mountain region. This resource was created by Janis B. Nuckolls, a linguistics professor at Brigham Young University; Tod D. Swanson, a religious studies professor at Arizona State University; a number of student researchers; and a team of Quechua language consultants. Users can browse Quechua Real Words alphabetically or by type (sound; sound & motion; motion; other sensations). Each word is accompanied by a short definition as well as videos of Quechuan speakers so that visitors can get a full sense of how these words sound when accompanied by gestures. In addition, Quechua Real Words includes a pronunciation guide. [MMB]

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Health and science educators may be interested in Morbus Delirium, an interactive educational game created by the Montreal Science Centre and the Virtual Museum of Canada. In this game, young learners explore epidemiology by confronting a mysterious pathogen impacting their community. To do so, learners take on the role of a biologist working at the Montreal Science Centre to create a pair of "augmented reality biotech glasses" that has the ability to spot microorganisms. Players have the option of exploring this game in two different modes. The easy mode is designed for "young scientists who have a basic knowledge of biology for viruses, DNA, and anatomy," while hard mode is designed for players "who have a very advanced scientific knowledge including general understanding of genes, chromosomes, living cells, and disease." As players advance in this game, they travel back in time to meet Frederick Montizambert, a physician who worked at the quarantine station at Grosse Isle in the late nineteenth century. This educational game may especially be of interest to educators who work in out-of-school contexts as well as parents and caregivers. [MMB]

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Bumble Bee Watch is a citizen science project that aims to map the year-round habitats of over 40 different species of bumble bees in order to learn how to best protect them in years to come. The project is directed by a number of Canadian organizations: Wildlife Preservation Canada; the University of Ottawa; York University; Beespotter; the Montreal Insectarium; the Natural History Museum, London; and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Those interested in participating in the project are invited to photograph bees to be added to the project's map. After users upload a photograph, they are asked to identify the bee's species, if possible. In the bumble bee species section, visitors will find a helpful guide to different bee species, complete with a photograph and diagram of each bee, a map of their geographic range, and a list of the flowers the species pollinates. After the bee's identifications are checked by an expert, the photograph is added to the Bumble Bee Watch gallery (which currently contains over 26,000 photographs of bees) and the accompanying data is incorporated into the project's dataset. Visitors can explore this data with ease through a series of drop-down menus that filter data by species, province/state, and year. [MMB]

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Charles Booth (1840-1916) was a British businessman and social reformer remembered today mostly for his efforts to document poverty in nineteenth-century London. He documented these efforts in his multivolume work Inquiry Into Life and Labor in London, which was published between 1889 and 1903. This publication was perhaps most well known for Booth's Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, which are color-coded according to wealth distribution in London on a street-by-street basis. In Charles Booth's London, a resource created by the London School of Economics (LSE), visitors can explore a digitized version of one of Booth's "poverty maps." As visitors view the map, they can use a slider at the bottom of their screen to transition between Booth's map and a modern-day Google map. Visitors may also conduct a search in order to explore a particular neighborhood or street of interest. In addition, visitors can explore some of the Booth's notebooks to learn more about his research process. These notebooks include a series of entries by police officers who assisted Booth in surveying neighborhoods for his maps. [MMB]

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The American Academy of Neurology (AAN) offers this resource collection for K-12 educators interested in incorporating neuroscience into their classrooms. As of this write-up, the section entitled "Free Tools for the Classroom" is temporarily unavailable as the AAN is restocking these items, but educators will find a number of links to materials that may be of interest in the Resources for Teachers and Parent Educators section. These materials are organized by grade level and include articles, classroom activities, diagrams, worksheets, and more. These resources come from a variety of sources, including National Geographic and Eric H. Chudler's website Neuroscience for Kids. [MMB]

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5 Minute Librarian is a frequently updated blog founded by public librarian Jess Bacon that may appeal to librarians, educators, and anyone who works closely with young readers. Authored by a team of librarians, 5 Minute Librarian's tagline is "All you need to know in all the time you have." In keeping with this mission, this blog offers helpful tips and ideas related to collection development, library programming, marketing, and more through a series of concise blog posts. Recent blog posts have included "14 Ways Librarians Can Help Immigrant Children and Families," "8 Creative Book Club Ideas," and "10 Insider Secrets Librarians Only Tell Their Friends with Kids." Visitors can browse pasts posts by tags including "Librarian 101," "Time-Savers," and "Ready to Go Book Displays." One highlight of this blog is Spoilers, Sweetie, which offers helpful synopses (and yes, spoilers) of books that have been selected for awards, including the Man Booker Prize, the Newberry Medal, and the Caldecott Medal. [MMB]

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The Freedmen's Bureau was established after the U.S. Civil War in order to provide assistance to "refugees and freedman" living in the American South. Importantly, the Freedmen's Bureau produced a number of important documents, including marriage records and labor contracts. Mapping the Freedmen's Bureau is a resource created by genealogists Angela Walton-Raji and Toni Carrier designed to help genealogists and historians find historical documents of interest. In the maps section, visitors can find the location of dozens of Freedmen's Bureau officers, as well as camps and hospitals, which are organized on the map by pins. By selecting a pin of interest, visitors can find out how to access documents created at this particular office. Many of these offices have digitized these documents and made them available online (usually through Family Search; some through the Internet Archive). A second map features the locations of Freedmen's Bureau banks. The research guide section contains detailed pamphlets, courtesy of the National Archives, of the Freedmen's Bureau records from each state. Finally, the sample documents section provides examples of the types of documents the Freedmen's Bureau created. [MMB]

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For classical music fans, NPR's Deceptive Cadence offers a way to discover new artists and learn about news and conversations in the classical music world. News and audio clips are organized into four categories. Issues & ideas feature articles about the history of classical music, which are discussed along with contemporary issues in the field. For instance, in one recent article, NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviews Givonna Joseph, a mezzo-soprano and founder of Opera Creole, an organization that "is resurrecting music written by local composers of color and others who've been left out of the overwhelmingly white, male canon." Another recent article considers the role of the London Sympathy Orchestra in the Star Wars films. Music makers feature artist news, profiles, and reviews. Finally, folks interested in hearing new music will want to go straight to now playing. [MMB]

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How many people do you need to gather in order to find two individuals with the same birthday? Most people who asked this question tend to answer with a number that is much too high. The phenomenon is known as the "birthday paradox." Russell Goldenberg of The Pudding has created this interactive experiment designed to help visitors understand the math behind the birthday paradox. In this experiment, visitors are invited to share their birthday month and date. Next, they have the opportunity to see how previous visitors answered the question. In doing so, visitors can see the "birthday paradox" in action. As visitors view how an increasing number of participants answered the question, they will view an accompanying graph that demonstrates the law of large numbers. Visitors who enjoy this interactive will want to check out other projects included in The Pudding's Essays About Explainers. [MMB]

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The Public Medievalist is a group blog dedicated to issues at the intersection of public history and medieval studies. The blog's editor, medieval historian Paul Sturtevant, explains that public history refers to "any way in which the public encounters and learns more about the past outside traditional academic circles like university courses or scholarly books." Accordingly, articles in The Public Medievalist examine how the medieval world is portrayed and understood in our contemporary world. In one recent blog post, medieval literature scholar Shiloh Carroll considers how the Game of Thrones series portrays the Middle Ages. Readers interested in this topic will also want to check out Carroll's book, Medievalism in A Song of Ice & Fire & Game of Thrones. Meanwhile, in a recent series of blog posts, a number of scholars investigate different aspects of race and racism in the Middle Ages. Among other issues, this series addresses how white supremacists have disturbingly distorted medieval history in the present-day. Interested readers can subscribe to The Public Medievalist in order to receive emails of recently published blog posts. [MMB]

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As journalist Nicola Twilley writes, "[f]or scientists, pain has long presented an intractable problem: it is a physiological process, just like breathing or digestion, and yet it is inherently, stubbornly subjective--only you feel your pain." In this recent article by The New Yorker, which appeared in the July 2 print edition of the magazine, Twilley investigates what the growing field of neuroscience may be able to tell us about the role our brains play in the experience of pain. Twilley met with Dr. Irene Tracey, who heads Oxford University's Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience. Tracey has dedicated her career to studying pain and she currently heads the Pain Analgesia/Anaesthesia Imaging Neuroscience (P.A.I.N.) group, a multidisciplinary team of scientists dedicated to understanding the science of pain. For the past several decades, Tracey has been investigating what areas of the brain respond to pain with the aid of a functional magnetic resonance imagery (FMRI) machine. For this article, Twilley describes the experience of viewing her own brain's response to pain. Twilley also traces the history of pain research in the nineteenth and twentieth century and considers the potential legal and medical implication of this new and emerging research about the neuroscience of pain. [MMB]

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The Oakland Museum of Contemporary Art (OCMA) hosts this extensive collection of thousands of digitized political posters. These posters are part of "All of Us Or None," an archiving project launched in 1977 by Michael Rossman. This collection includes posters related to organizations, labor issues, social movements, local issues, environmentalism, global issues, and much more. The posters are from around the globe and were created throughout the twentieth century. Visitors can conduct a keyword search to find posters of interest. Alternatively, the collection makes for interesting browsing: visitors can see thumbnail images of each poster as a grid or as a list. Unsurprisingly, this Oakland-based collection also includes a number of posters from the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. The collection also includes a number of posters created by the La Raza Silkscreen Center and from Japantown Art and Media, both based in the Bay Area. [MMB]

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Hosted by Nate Sloan, a music professor at Fordham University, and musician and songwriter Charlie Harding, Switched on Pop is a podcast dedicated to "the making and meaning of popular music." Each episode of this podcast is dedicated to a single contemporary song and, occasionally, a pop song from yesterday. To do so, they often invite a guest musician on the show to discuss the song's lyrics, musical characteristics, and influences. Although each episode is singled on one particular song, Sloan, Harding, and guests usually end up discussing a number of songs in the podcast. On this website, listeners will find a list of discussed songs listed alongside each episode. Recent episodes of Switched on Pop have featured discussions of "After the Storm" by Kali Uchis, Tyler the Creator, and Bootsy Collins; "HUMBLE" by Kendrick Lamar; and "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys [MMB]

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This online exhibition from The Morgan Library & Museum allows visitors to virtually explore August Hare's popular guidebook "Walks in Rome," published in 1870. Views dating from the nineteenth century showing just over a dozen famous sites in Rome - such as the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, or the Villa Medici - are paired with contemporary views from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, often including literary works as well. For example, J.M.W. Turner's painting, Interior of St. Peter's Basilica is paired with a photograph of the Basilica's dome from 1983 and a passage from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818). The Triton Fountain, designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1624-43, can be viewed in print from 1852 and in a color photograph from 2008, along with an excerpt from Robert Browning's poem The Ring and the Book. There is also an interactive map based on a digital version of Paul-Marie Letarouilly's 1841 plan of Rome to allow visitors to plot the locations of the attractions they visit virtually; however, this would not launch the day we visited. [DS]

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Elvish is an interactive shell and scripting language with an emphasis on user-friendliness and manipulation of structured data. In contrast to more traditional shells, where pipelines can only carry unstructured text, pipelines in Elvish can also carry list, maps, and other rich data types. The built-in "from-json" command is particularly useful for consuming data from a JSON-producing API (e.g., from DPLA, GitHub, Wikidata, and so on). The Powerful Pipelines tab on the Elvish homepage contains an example of parsing a GitHub JSON issue feed to produce a summary of recent issues. To aid with ease of use, Elvish includes interactive command completion features and also an integrated file manager. It also incorporates a directory history feature similar to utilities like autojump, z, or fasd. The integrated file manager uses a Miller columns layout reminiscent of the macOS file browser or UNIX tools like ranger, rover, or nnn. Elvish is free software, available under the BSD license, with source code on GitHub. Pre-built executables are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. [CRH]

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QTM is a desktop application for writing and revising weblog entries. QTM can interface with any blogging platform or content management system that understands the MetaWeblog API. Currently, this includes Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, TypePad, and Squarespace, among others. The "How do I set up QTM to access my blog?" entry under "Using QTM" gives detailed instructions on how to configure QTM to work with a variety of systems. Once configured, users can opt to compose blog entries either using QTM's What You See Is What You Get (or WYSIWYG) interface or by using markdown formatting. The "Quick Post" feature gives users a system tray icon that they can click to begin a new post from a series of pre-configured templates. QTM is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v2, with source code available on bitbucket. Pre-built executables are available from the QTM website for Windows and macOS. For Linux, most major distributions include a QTM package. [CRH]

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Last featured in the 11-11-2016 Scout Report, Beyond Citation is a valuable resource for librarians, scholars, instructors, and students. By allowing visitors to quickly learn about popular datasets, Beyond Citation offers an important service for researchers in all academic disciplines.

Researchers, students, and instructors use academic databases to find scholarship on topics of interest. Yet, it is difficult to get information about how these databases work and what materials are included in - or left out of - them. In response to this challenge, a group of students in a digital praxis seminar at the City University of New York (CUNY) created Beyond Citation, a website dedicated to providing the public with information and analysis about major academic search engines. As of this writing, Beyond Citation features explorations of thirteen major databases, including Google Books, Project MUSE, HathiTrust Digital Library, JSTOR, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Each database record includes an overview outlining what the database contains, available reviews of each database, and information about access. In addition, readers will also find a useful conversations feature, which offers links to outside analysis and criticism about the selected database. Beyond Citation not only helps researchers critically evaluate databases but also teaches researchers how to use these databases most effectively.

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