The Scout Report -- Volume 23, Number 38

Most well known for his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Thomas Gray was an eighteenth century British poet, satirist, and all-around "polymath" with a passion for history, literature, science, philosophy and more. Reimer Eck of Goettingen State and University Library and Alexander Huber of the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries have teamed up to create The Thomas Gray Archive. Here, visitors will find all major works by Gray, accompanied by an extensive collection of the Gray's correspondence. These items are perhaps best explored via the Digital Library (available under the Texts tab), which allows visitors to browse items by category. Note that this section also features audio versions of three of Gray's poems, read by actors Michael Burrell and the late Sir Michael Redgrave. In the Resources tab, visitors will find a variety of tools and resources to aide in analysis of Gray's work, including links to scholarly criticism, a chronology of Gray's life, and a glossary of significant personal and place names. [MMB]

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From PBS Learning Media comes the Shape of Life, a "series of free, short classroom videos that beautifully explore the evolution of the animal kingdom on planet Earth." These short documentary films (approximately fifteen minutes in length) are aimed at middle-school level learners and feature gorgeous images, helpful animations, and commentary from science experts. Shape of Life also features lesson plans, supplemental resources (including additional readings and short videos), and blog posts aimed at science educators. To explore this rich collection, visitors can view the complete library of Shape of Life videos via the Downloads tab, where videos are organized by five categories (Phyla, Behavior, Animation, Scientist, and Other Topics). Here, videos are accompanied by related lesson plans and resources. Visitors may also browse videos and resources by subject tag, or explore resources by Lesson Plans or by Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). [MMB]

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David Gooblar, a lecturer in the Rhetoric Department at the University of Iowa, launched Pedagogy Unbound in 2013 in order to provide a space for college instructors to discuss and share ideas about curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy in higher education. Gooblar also authors a column by the same name for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Vitae. On this website, visitors can access a number of teaching ideas and tips submitted by Gooblar and other contributors. These tips are organized into categories such as Academic Honesty, Online and Hybrid Courses, Using Technology, and Making Better Writers. Some of these tips include citations for those interested in reading more. College-level instructors are invited to submit their own tips to this growing collection. [MMB]

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Acid Free is the open-access, online, quarterly magazine of the Los Angeles Archivists Collective (LAAC). Established in 2014, LAAC "aims to bring the Los Angeles community together to discuss, collaborate, connect, and support each other," largely through workshops and networking activities. This vibrant, eclectic magazine, now on its fifth issue, will especially appeal to librarians and archivists but may also appeal more broadly to anyone interested in archives, history, or Los Angeles. In the most recent issue, which centers on the theme "Organize," readers will find an interview with Steven Booth, the archivist at the Barack Obama Presidential Library and an article by Dorothy Berry of the University of Minnesota about the university's African-American Hidden Collection Projects, part of Umbra Search African American History. Articles in Acid Free are often accompanied by photographs of archival material. Readers can check out all current and past issues of the magazine through this link. [MMB]

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For instructors and tutors who work with mathematics learners of all levels, Numeracy is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal from the National Numeracy Network (NNN) and is supported by the University of South Florida Libraries. Published biannually since 2008, Numeracy features editorials, articles, book reviews, discussions, and more dedicated to "support[ing] education at all levels that integrates quantitative skills across discipline." The most recent issue includes an analysis by two faculty members of Hostos Community College of The City University of New York that analyzes the reliability of a popular numeracy assessment tool for community college students; an article that compares statistics education for undergraduate sociology majors at a variety of colleges, and two essays that debate the role of qualitative literacy in informed citizenship. Articles from all current and past issues of this journal are available for download in PDF format. [MMB]

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American football fans will remember "deflategate" - the controversy that centered on the allegation that the New England Patriots deliberately deflated their footballs prior to their 2015 playoff victory against the Indiana Colts. This recent addition to the MIT BLOSSOMS instructional video series uses "deflategate" to engage high school-level physics students to Gay-Lussac's Gas Law. In this video, John J. Leonard of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering leads students through a series of nine hands-on, group problem solving exercises. These exercises are designed to facilitate student understanding of the relationship between temperature and air pressure. Students then use this knowledge to predict the pressure measurements of three footballs stored at three different temperatures. Finally, students use the ideal gas law to analyze the questions at stake in "deflategate." This interactive lesson plan is accompanied by a teacher's guide and a few additional resources, including a link to the 243-page investigative report about "deflategate." [MMB]

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The Open Yale Courses YouTube series allow learners from around the world to access lectures from Yale University scholars about a wide variety of topics. This recording from 2011 is part of a history course at Yale University, taught by Professor and Historian Joanne B. Freeman. Professor Freeman presents a series of engaging lectures about the American Revolution. As Freeman stresses in her first lecture, while most contemporary Americans imagine the Revolutionary War as the defining event of the American Revolution, late eighteenth century Americans who lived through it had a much broader and more complex understanding of the term. This lecture series addresses social, cultural and military aspects of the American Revolution, spanning 25 lectures. Lecture titles include "Resistance or Rebellion? (Or, What the Heck is Happening in Boston?)"; "Who Were the Loyalists?"; and "Citizens and Choices: Experiencing the Revolution in New Haven." Each of these lectures can be incorporated into U.S. History courses for either high school or college-level students. These engaging lectures will also appeal to anyone interested in learning more about American History. [MMB]

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The Sophia Project was launched in 1999 by a group of college-level instructors who hoped to "build the world's largest online repository for free educational resources in the fields of philosophy and ethics for the sole purpose of expanding the domain of human wisdom." Almost two decades later, the Sophia Project has expanded to include a publishing branch (SophiaOmni Press, launched in 2009) and continues to offer a number of texts related to philosophy and ethics for free on this website. Here, visitors are invited to browse both primary sources related to the disciplines of philosophy and ethics and helpful encyclopedia-style summaries of key authors and texts. In the Philosophy Archives section, readers can browse texts by categories such as Classical Philosophy, 19th - 20th Century Philosophy, and Eastern Philosophy. For philosophy instructors and students alike, the Sophia Project offers a helpful one-stop-shop for resources, including key works by Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and much more. [MMB]

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For art fans and anyone interested in learning more about contemporary Japanese artists, this virtual art museum allows visitors to explore "modern artworks by Japan's representative artists," from anywhere in the world. Sponsored by the airline ANA, the IJC Museum was designed by Akio Takatsuka and features work by renowned artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Kohei Nawa, and Hisashi Tenmyouya. The museum, which garnered a Webby Award for Best User Interface, uses 3D scanners to allow viewers to view sculptures in great detail. As viewers travel through the museum, they can click on a variety of tags to zoom in on or rotate featured works of art. Visitors may also select an About the Artist link to learn more about each featured artist, which includes information about each artist and additional photographs and videos of each artist's work. [MMB]

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The Cotsen Collection at Princeton's Firestone Library, a children's literature special collection, has created Playing Soviet, which is an interactive database of rarely-seen Soviet-era children's book illustrations. The illustrations were gifted to the Firestone Library by Lloyd E. Cotsen, class of 1950 of Princeton University. The original gift totaled approximately 1,500 illustrations and has now grown to 2,500. Visitors are invited to browse this collection via tabs at the top of the site: The Books, Browse Illustrations, Artists, and Data Mapping. This fascinating collection highlights both different artistic trends of early Soviet Russia (including socialist realism and avant-garde), as well as the ways in which Soviet leaders attempted to influence young readers via these books. As the team behind this site notes, the "arbiters of Soviet culture" believed that these illustrations played an important role in the state's mission: "Directives for a new kind of children's literature were founded on the assumption that the 'language of images' was immediately comprehensible to the mass reader, far more so than the typed word." [MMB]

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Religion in American History is a group blog that is currently managed by Cara Burnidge, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Northern Iowa; Michael Hammond, Academic Dean of Humanities, Arts, & Biblical Studies at Taylor University; and authored by an interdisciplinary team of scholars. Visitors will find updates about new books, exhibits, and perspectives relating to the role of religion in U.S. History. This blog also includes reflections on teaching about the history of religion that may especially appeal to college-level instructors. One recent post authored by scholar Guy Aikin, explores and analyzes the origins of the ubiquitous phrase "speak truth to power," which first appeared in print in a 1955 American Friends Service Committee pamphlet that was co-authored by Quaker civil rights activist (and one of the main organizers of the March on Washington) Bayard Rustin. Aikin notes that "Rustin and his co-authors expunged Rustin's name from the pamphlet because of his arrest on charges of committing a homosexual act in 1953." Another recent post highlights new books relating to religion and American History that are to be published between September and December of 2017. [MMB]

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"Cosmogonies are the stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the world," explains Jim Cogswell, artist and faculty member at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design. Cogswell's new exhibit, "Cosmogonic Tattoos" is intended to honor two of the University of Michigan's museums - the Kelsey Museum of Archeology and University of Michigan Museum of Art - and demonstrate how these two distinct museums are connected. Cogswell created two vinyl murals that are currently being displayed on the windows of both museums (through December 2017) featuring objects that appear in each museum's collection. On this accompanying website, visitors are invited to explore this fascinating project. Visitors may want to start by checking out a short video in the Exhibition portion of this website, in which Cogswell explains how he created mylar paintings over photographs of museum objects and then reorganized these images using Adobe Illustrator to create his window designs. Visitors can explore some of the featured objects, Cogswell's mosaic paintings, and images of the completed mural, in which Cogswell's rendition of museum items appear as colorful vinyl mosaics. [MMB]

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On Friday, September 15th, the nearly twenty-year-long Cassini-Huygens mission came to an end when the probe sent into space by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) completed a "death dive" into Saturn's atmosphere. Over the past thirteen years, Cassini has captured spectacular images and revealed previously unknown facts about the planet along with its rings and moons. BBC News has created this fascinating multimedia essay about the history and significance of the Cassini mission. Here, visitors can learn more about Dr. Linda Spilker, who has worked on the Cassini mission since 1988; learn about how NASA and ESA came to collaborate on this project; check out a map of Cassini's travels; view images from the probe (including an image of Saturn's moon Titan and an image of the hurricanes discovered at the planet's pole); and learn about what missions may come next. [MMB]

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Manuscript Road Trip is a blog by Lisa Fagin Davis, a scholar who serves as Executive Director of Medieval Academy of America and specializes in North American manuscripts from the medieval era. In her blog, Davis takes readers on a "roadtrip" of notable manuscripts in the continental United States. A few of the most recent entries in this blog describe the dramatic story of one manuscript, which was recently on display at the Boston Public library, that was just identified as a "late fourteenth-century collection of statutes governing a Venetian confraternity, a type of manuscript known as a mariegola." Davis recognized that it appeared that someone had tampered with this rare manuscript, raising questions about the manuscript's provenance. In fact, the manuscript, Mariegola della Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia, was one of several stolen manuscripts from the Italian State Archives in the mid-twentieth century. The manuscript was recently returned to its home in Italy. For more manuscript mysteries and news, check out this regularly updated blog. [MMB]

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During the late nineteenth century, a number of individuals from "Basque Country" in Europe immigrated to Southwest Idaho. As a result, the state of Idaho (particularly, the city of Boise) is home to the second-largest community of Basque individuals in the United States and contains a number of sites related to Basque history and culture. On the Boise Basque Tour website, visitors from around the world are invited to take a virtual tour of fourteen of these sites. These sites include the Cyrus Jacobs/Uberuaga House, which hosted numerous Basque families during the early twentieth century; the Chico club, a building that was constructed in 1935 by Augustin and Petra Belaustegui and was originally the Belaustegui Hotel & Basque Boarding House; and the Basque Museum and Cultural Center, which was established in 1985. Note that the description of the museum includes a link to museum's website, where visitors are invited to take a virtual tour of the Cyrus Jacobs/Uberuaga House. This historic house was the original site of the museum. [MMB]

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As wars continue to be fought in places rich with ancient art, monuments, and other works of human ingenuity, this site from the Getty Research Institute documenting Palmyra, Syria is timely. It is comforting, assuring us that this important history will not be completely lost. The images on the site include eighteenth-century drawings, maps, and illustrations by Louis-Francois Cassas (1756-1827); images from eighteenth-century books created by wealthy travelers, such as "The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor" 1753, by Robert Wood or "Egyptian Sepulchers and Syrian Shrines" 1862, by Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe, Viscountess Strangford; and nineteenth century photographs by Louis Vignes (1831-1896) taken in 1864, as well as a few modern images of twentieth and twenty-first century Palmyra. The Getty acquired a large collection of Vignes's work in 2015, which had not been widely published previously. In the section on the Temple of Bel, originally constructed in the first century CE, and whose ruins were largely destroyed during the Islamic State (ISIS) occupation of Palmyra in 2015, there are 16 images either created by Vignes, or based on Cassas's work. This includes a Plan of the Temple of Bel, which is an etching done by Charles-Nicolas Varin after Louis-Francois Cassas in 1799. Also included are other prints created by French engravers after Cassas and eight albumen prints of the temple ruins by Vignes from 1864. In the modern section, a 1962 photo of a Polish archaeological expedition to Palmyra shows what was left of the colonnade at the Temple of Bel at that time. [DS]

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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is home to 34,678 objects. As the museum explains, that means that if all of SFMOMA's works were on display at once, one would have to walk 121.3 miles to view each piece. In response to this need, SFMOMA has created the delightful and interactive Send Me SFMOMA, an SMS service that invites art lovers to explore the musuem's collection with a single text. To engage with Send SFMOMA, users can simply text a request to 572-51 that begins with the phrase "Send me." Within moments, users will receive an image of artwork in SFMOMA's collection that matches the keyword. For example, if a user types "Send me joy," they may receive Asako Shimazaki joyful 1989 photograph "Dance Girls, Tenderloin, San Francisco." Text "Send me an octopus", and you may get Wilfred Weisser's promotional poster "Country Joe and the Fish, Incredible String Band, Albert Collins; Fillmore Auditorium, May 16-18, 1968," which does, in fact, feature a vibrant depiction of an octopus. Visitors are invited to complete the "Send Me" request with anything, including an emoji. [MMB]

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Light Table is an integrated development environment that includes interactive debugging and code execution features. These features can be used to inspect and modify programs as they are running. For example, users may mark variables they are interested in and watch their values change as programs execute. Users may also change bits of program code and see the results reflected immediately. Light Table has built-in support Javascript, Python, and Clojure. Numerous additional languages can be added using Light Table's plugin system. Light Table can also be used to examine the HTML, CSS, and Javascript of remote websites. Users can even make their own local modifications to see what effect they would have (for example, to try out CSS changes). Light Table is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. [CRH]

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