The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 30

Readers interested in new research on earth systems science and sustainability may want to check out Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. Founded by BioOne in 2013, Elementa is a peer-reviewed, open-access digital journal published by the University of California Press since 2017. Visitors to this resource will find transdisciplinary academic articles on new knowledge of the Earths physical, chemical, and biological systems; interactions between human and natural systems; and steps that can be taken to mitigate and adapt to global change. Elementa concentrates its work among five knowledge domains: atmospheric science, earth and environmental science, ecology, ocean science, and sustainability transitions. Each domain has its own editorial board led by expert researchers in that field. In addition to research and review articles, Elementa publishes Policy Bridges and Practice Bridges, which are articles that focus respectively on connecting scientific knowledge to policy issues and to practical applications. Many articles are also part of Elementas themed special collections, which include sets of related articles as Special Features and topical Forums intended to stimulate academic dialog on a specific opportunity or difficulty. Articles from this journal can be accessed in a variety of machine- as well as human-intelligible formats, including HTML, PDF, EPUB3, and Mobi. [JDC]

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The US Census Bureau provides access to a staggering amount of data that can be used to create "detailed portraits of the changing characteristics of [American] communities," but for the uninitiated, interpreting that data can be a challenge. To help address this difficulty, the Census Bureaus Statistics in Schools (SIS) program has created this collection of classroom geography activities designed to supplement the standard curriculum while providing useful learning tools related to real life data. Here, readers will find detailed, well-developed activity plans for students in grades 4-12, broadly grouped into grade level appropriate topics: elementary (e.g. "Examining Changes to the Environment Through Pictures and Data"), middle school (e.g. "What role does Geography Play in the Census?"), and high school (e.g. "Analyzing Correlations of Education and Income"). Individual activities indicate the specific grade level(s) they are intended for, and each gives a description, states the time and materials required, and also provides a list of learning objectives and a Bloom's Taxonomy teacher's note. Each lesson includes downloadable PDFs of teacher and student versions of the activity. [JDC]

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Readers curious to learn about ancient languages and linguistics may find this collection of free self-study lessons provided by the Linguistic Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin to be a helpful starting point. Here, visitors will find introductory lesson series for more than fifteen ancient Indo-European languages, including (for example) Classical Greek, Old Norse, and Ancient Sanskrit. The lesson series in this collection assume no special knowledge of the languages or linguistics, and they aim to provide an introduction to the basic structures of the respective languages, highlight issues of scholarly debate, guide readers in the reading and analysis of texts, and situate the languages and their documents within their cultural and historical context. These text-based lessons focus on developing learners reading knowledge of the languages and do not include audio recordings, though the materials for some languages include written explanations of pronunciations. Each lesson uses historical texts written in that lessons language as its base, and the majority of the series has ten lessons for each language. The languages time periods vary widely, ranging from the 17th to 12th centuries BCE (Hittite) to the 16th to 21st centuries CE (Albanian). [JDC]

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For fans of interactive maps and geospatial visualizations, Esris Landsat Explorer is a welcome boon, providing access to publicly-available imagery from the Landsat Program, a satellite program run jointly by NASA and the US Geological Survey that has focused on observing Earths land surfaces since its start in 1972. Esris Landsat Explorer, launched in 2017, is a sophisticated web app that enables users to visualize our planet and understand how the Earth has changed over time, with more than 40 years of data available. New users may want to begin by checking out the web apps tutorial (denoted toward the bottom of the menu on the left by a graduation cap icon), which provides a thorough introduction to Landsat Explorers various imagery and analytical tools, such as more than a dozen different renderings of Landsat band combinations, a mask tool, and a change detection tool to compare two different points in time. In addition to using Landsat Explorers built-in data, users can add data from ArcGIS Online to the web app as well as save their top layer in Landsat Explorer to ArcGIS Online, and they can also download their top layer as a TIF image. [JDC]

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While probably best known for their PBS documentary series Art in the Twenty First Century (mentioned in the June 16, 2017 Scout Report), Art21 has produced a variety of digital media, including a quarterly magazine, launched in 2007 as the Art21 Blog, which became the Art21 Magazine in 2013 in a shift from guest contributor posts to theme-centered quarterly issues. "Becoming An Artist" was treated in the inaugural issue, October/November 2013, with videos by Nancy Spero, An-My L, Jessica Stockholder, Yinka Shonibare, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Ursula von Rydingsvard, discussing how they first came to regard art as their occupation. A related theme appeared in the Fall 2018 Being An Artist issue, where Lucia Hierro and William Kentridge (the subject of Art21s feature film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, 2009) discuss the impact of their family backgrounds and culture on their path to becoming artists. In addition to theme-centered work, Art21 Magazine features a variety of regular columns, such as "Teaching with Contemporary Art," where artist-educators share their approaches to instruction. Visitors to the site can also subscribe to feeds of video, education, and guest blog posts. [DS]

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Have you ever wondered why we wear what we do, or why certain fashion trends remain popular over long periods of time while other fads fade away? These questions and more are explored in the podcast Dressed: The History of Fashion. Dressed, which is hosted by April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary, discusses fashion trends through a historical lens and often includes interviews with historians and fashion professionals about the subject. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one of the most recent shows is entitled, "Styling the American Suffragist," and includes an interview with fashion historian Raissa Bretana "about the relationship between fashion and the 20th century suffrage movement." Other recent topics covered in the show include the history of men's' facial hair, an interview with "Dress Detective" Amber Butchart, and the evolution of high heels (which were worn by men before women). Dressed episodes typically run about an hour in length. Listeners have the option to stream the show directly from the website or listen via your favorite podcast app. [JLB]

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The Ohio State University houses an extensive Historic Costume and Textiles Collection that contains over 11,500 objects, such as textiles, articles of clothing, and accessories dating as far back as the mid-18th century. In an effort to make this collection more accessible to academics, artists, and interested aficionados, curators have digitized and made a portion of the collection available online via Fashion2Fiber. As of this write-up, Fashion2Fiber features nearly 400 examples selected from the Historic Costume and Textiles Collection, with each item including a written description, its time period, the type of fabric used, its designer (if applicable), and multiple photographs. The items in Fashion2Fiber have been organized into more than two dozen collections, most of which are delineated by decade, such as 1820-1829. Other collections include Ethnographic Costume & Textiles and the Ann W. Rudolph Button Collections. Another notable feature is The Columbus Fashion Story, a virtual exhibit that "examines the founding clothing manufacturers of Columbus, Ohio, throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the circumstances of the time period that allowed them to be successful in an era of innovations in both clothing and its large-scale production." [JDC]

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The Fashion History Timeline is an excellent resource for learning about how fashion, textiles, and other garments have evolved over time across the world. The timeline is a project of the Fashion Institute of Technology and began in 2015 as part of a class that created artwork analysis entries. New visitors to the site may want to begin on the About page, which provides some interesting insight into the history and mission of the timeline, which "aims to be an important contribution to public knowledge of the history of fashion and to serve as a constantly growing and evolving resource not only for students and faculty, but also for the wider world of those interested in fashion and dress history (from the Renaissance scholar to the simply curious)." Visitors can browse fashion by time period, ranging from prehistoric to modern day. The site also features essays that encompass artwork and garment analysis, for example. Readers may also want to look through a fashion history dictionary, read about designers, and peruse the timeline's blog. An extremely useful aspect of the site for those conducting research is the source database, which includes hundreds of digital surrogates of primary source material relating to fashion history. [JLB]

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Clothing and textiles are often deeply integral to a people's culture and history. For those who are living geographically apart from their ancestral culture, clothing can also offer a way to develop or maintain a connection with their cultural heritage and history. The Costume Institute of the African Diaspora (CIAD) is an organization "dedicated to researching the history and culture of clothing and adornment from the African Diaspora and using that research to produce outcomes such as projects and lectures in order to educate the public about dress cultures developed by people of African heritage." Visitors to CIAD's website can begin by exploring the organization's projects, such as an exhibition about how tartan fabric and patterns traveled among cultures in Africa and the African diaspora. CIAD also created a 35-minute documentary accompanying this exhibition, which is available under Resources, along with several other videos and a bibliography of books about African textiles and fashion. Readers may additionally enjoy CIAD's blog, which offers critical commentary on "the representation and the aesthetics of the black body within the cultural landscape of fashion." Based in London, CIAD was founded in 2011 by its Creative Director and Principal Researcher Teleica Kirkland, who is also an associate lecturer at the London College of Fashion. [JDC]

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The Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI) is a fashion research organization that is home to a vast collection of both Western and Japanese clothing dating from the 2000s back to the 1600s, including numerous examples from haute couture designers such as Chanel and Balenciaga. Those who are unable to attend one of the institute's exhibitions in person would do well to visit their extensive digital archives. Organized chronologically and available in both Japanese and English, these archives enable visitors to browse centuries of sartorial history to their hearts' content. Upon arrival, readers will find a randomly generated selection of 12 items, which they can refresh via a button in the upper right, or they can choose a specific time period from the list on the left. Each item has a short yet detailed description, a beautiful photograph, and information about its date and place of origin as well as its materials. While some Japanese clothing is included in the KCI's collections, most of the pieces are from Western makers, a curatorial decision made by the institute's director and curator emeritus, Akiko Fukai, due to the absence of a research center in Japan that focused on Western fashion. [JDC]

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We originally featured this digital exhibition from Europeana in the 1-26-2018 Scout Report, and it is still informative and visually appealing for anyone whose interest is piqued by fashion history.

As fashionistas will attest, sartorial trends often cycle back around after a few years or decades of obscurity. This Europeana online exhibit demonstrates that fashion trends can also reemerge centuries after they first appeared. Drawing on the collections of a variety of European museums and other cultural institutions (including the Amsterdam Museum, Paris's Les Arts Decoratifs and the Victoria and Albert Museum), this exhibit allows visitors to compare clothing items of yesteryear with more modern reinterpretations side-by-side. For example, visitors can view a 1928 evening gown by Madeleine Vionnet alongside a 2005 Viktor & Rolf evening gown. Both gowns incorporate the same style of bow, although in very different ways. Another comparison places a late-18th-century frock coat alongside a 1981 Vivienne Westwood coat. These photographs are accompanied by short annotations that provide additional information about the clothing items displayed in the exhibit.

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