The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 9

Mapping Early American Elections is an ongoing digital humanities project from the Ray Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University that aims to "offer a window into the formative era of American politics by producing interactive maps and visualizations of Congressional and state legislative elections from 1787 to 1825." The project is headed by a team of history scholars and students and by software developer Ken Albers. As of this write-up, Mapping Early American Elections features a series of state maps that depict the results of the first five congressional elections on a county basis. During the first three Congressional elections, held between 1788 and 1795, the young nation was split between Federalists candidates (which enjoyed an advantage in most states) and Anti-Federalist candidates (who won in large swaths of New York state and North Carolina). By the fourth round of Congressional elections, which began in 1794, the Democratic-Republican party had formed, shaping new political divisions. As visitors explore these maps, they may choose to examine these elections in greater detail by downloading the election data (available via GitHub) and explore links to outside resources (many of which provide information about early Congressional candidates.) In addition, the project's blog page provides helpful context about early American politics. Mapping Early American Elections is currently a work in process, so stay tuned. [MMB]

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For art historians, educators, and enthusiasts, Met Publications (the publishing branch of New York's Metropolitan Museum) offers over 500 titles that interested readers may read online or download free of charge. These titles can be browsed by thematic category (including Medieval art, Byzantine art, and European art in the 20th century), by collection/department (including American decorative art, musical instruments, and drawings and prints), or by publication type (e.g. journal, exhibition catalogue, educator publication). Alternatively, visitors may also search this collection by title, author, or keyword. When searching or browsing, visitors have the option to limit search research to titles available to read online or to download. Titles available in these formats include American Ingenuity: Sportswear, 1930s-1970s by Richard Martin; Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators edited by Maryam D. Ekhtiar and Claire Moore; and Degas: The Artist's Mind by Theodore Reff. [MMB]

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From Massachusetts Institute of Technology's BLOSSOMS series comes this lesson designed to help high school-level students distinguish between causation and correlation. This hour-long lesson is led by Kamilya Tazhibayeva, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at MIT. At the beginning of this lesson, Tazhibayeva presents students with a series of deceptive newspaper headlines, including one that claims that credit cards lead to weight gain. Next, Tazhibayeva introduces a series of six activities designed to help students understand the concepts of correlation and causation and to think critically about these concepts. Throughout this video, students are introduced to related concepts including direct causation, indirect causation, spurious correlation, and omitted values. As with all MIT BLOSSOMS lessons, this lesson includes a video that instructors may choose to play during this lesson. The lesson is also accompanied by a number of related outside resources, including a Khan Academy video and a paper from Duke University about the statistics behind causation. [MMB]

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The term "citizen science" refers to collaborative scientific research projects that rely on everyday citizens to collect data. Many citizen science projects may be integrated into science classrooms, libraries, or museums. For educators and others interested in the keeping of citizen science projects, the Public Library of Open Science (PLOS) offers this useful blog. Here, visitors can learn about new citizen science projects and find out how they can get involved. CitizenSci is frequently updated and features writers such as Sarah Newman of the citizen science platform CitSci and Alycia Crall of Citizen Science Central at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. As a whole, this blog offers an excellent one-stop shop to learn about interesting citizen science projects around the globe. [MMB]

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Grammar Bytes is a website by Robin Simmons, an English and Humanities professor at the Valencia College in Orlando, Florida and a self-described "Grammar Instructor with Attitude." This website contains a wealth of resources for teaching and learning English grammar. These resources include the Daily Grammar Workout - a series of short grammar quizzes that Simmons shares on her Twitter account. Another helpful resource is the terms list: a glossary of terms like "auxiliary verb" and "essential clause." Best of all, Grammar Bytes also features a number of straightforward, interactive grammar exercises that might especially appeal to writing instructors looking for supplementary materials for their classroom. Users can browse these exercises by categories including apostrophes, pronoun agreement, and comma splices & fused sentences. This website also includes presentations, handouts, and links to a series of tips and rules available for download. [MMB]

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The History of Cartography is a multi-volume series that traces the history of mapping from prehistoric and ancient civilizations through the present. The series is a project of UW-Madison's History of Cartography Center and is published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press recently made the first three volumes of this series, which were originally published between 1987 and 2007, available free of charge in PDF format. These three volumes, edited by David Woodward and J.B. Harley, include analysis of early cartography in the continents of Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia. The PDF version of the book includes numerous maps and other images. Visitors can download PDFs by chapter, allowing visitors to explore specific topics of interest with ease. Visitors may also conduct a text search of the entire six-volume series. [MMB]

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The Brown Bookshelf is a blog spearheaded by "[a] group of authors and illustrators who came together to push awareness of the myriad of African American voices writing for young readers." Since 2008, the Brown Bookshelf has published an annual "28 Days Later" series throughout the month of February, in which they highlight Black authors and illustrators of children's books (including picture books, books for middle-grade readers, and young adult novels). In February 2018, the Brown Bookshelf honored young adult novelist Patrice Lawrence (author of Orange Boy, recipient of the 2017 Bookseller's YA Book Prize), Junot Diaz (the acclaimed novelist recently authored the children's book Islandborn), Vashti Harrison (author of Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History), and many others. Many of the 28 Days Later write-ups feature a short profile written by the featured author (or artist). Through the 28 Days Later series, the Brown Bookshelf offers a fabulous resource for librarians, educators, youth workers, and caretakers in search of contemporary children's books. Visitors can also check out 28 Days Later honorees from previous years on this website. [MMB]

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The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) publishes ChemHealthWeb - an online resource for K-12 science educators and students. ChemHealthWeb features profiles of researchers who investigate the intersections of health and chemistry and provide helpful summaries of recent scientific research. Visitors can explore researcher profiles in the Meet a Chemist section, while articles are organized on the site's homepage. In the teacher's resources guide, educators will find a graphic organizer designed to accompany the article "You Are What You Eat," which addresses the science of nutrition. In addition, the website includes a Chemistry A-Z glossary. Educators can also order a free Chemistry of Health booklet or poster through this website. [MMB]

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From the Virtual Museum of Canada comes the Soundtrack of Our Lives, a unique online exhibition that explores how people and communities interact with sound and music throughout their lives. This exhibition was produced by the Mediat-Muse, a network of museums in Quebec and Bienvenue Multimedia, a web design company. Visitors have the option of exploring this project in three ways. In the Life exhibit, visitors explore sounds associated with different parts of life. For example, in the childhood section, visitors can listen to nursery rhymes and watch an interview with Denis Dion, who has composed music for children's television shows. In the Year exhibit, visitors can explore music and sounds by season. In the winter section, visitors can listen to the Quebec Winter Carnival Song and music associated with Christmas, New Years, and Mardi Gras. Finally, the Day exhibit organizes sounds around a typical day, from waking up (chirping birds) to evening activities (including soap operas and hockey nights). [MMB]

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For Twitter users, along with fans of science journalism, Real Scientists is "a rotational Twitter account featuring scientists, researchers, clinicians, writers, communicators, and policymakers talking about their lives and their work." Each week, Real Scientists invites a different scientific expert to "curate" their Twitter account, providing links and commentary about recent scientific news and research through tweets and retweets. For instance, during this past week (starting on February 25, 2018), the Real Scientist Twitter account has been curated by Dr. Michael D.L. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Immunobiology at the University of Arizona. Just one week earlier (February 18-24), the page was curated by Dr. Stephani Page, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina who holds a doctorate in biochemistry and biophysics. Visitors can learn about past curators in the section entitled Our Curators or by exploring the site's archives. [MMB]

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The Smithsonian Museums are home to a number of materials that illuminate the history of hip-hop and rap music. In anticipation of the Smithsonian's upcoming anthology of rap music, the museum has compiled this online exhibit of photographs, boom boxes, album covers, and other items that may be for interest to hip-hop fans. These items include a 1979 flier for a Bronx rap battle featuring Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel; a 1988 photograph of KRS-1 and Ms. Melodie; the boom box carried by the character Radio Raheem in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing; and a photograph of Jay-Z taken by Dan Winters. Each item in this collection is accompanied by a short description and cataloging information. [MMB]

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From PBS Digital Studios comes the Origin of Everything: a series of lively, short videos that offers the origin stories behind everything from the custom of handwashing after using the bathroom to the popular belief that Santa Claus wears red. Launched in September 2017, the show is hosted by Yale doctoral candidate Danielle Bainbridge who notes, "[h]istory isn't just about examining a distant set of dates in the past. It's about bringing a level of critical urgency to all the questions we're asking by saying, 'Why did this story/date/event become respected as historical 'truth'?" In each episode, Bainbridge unpacks each origin story with the aid of historical photographs, short videos, and other helpful graphics. Each episode is approximately ten minutes in length. Visitors can check out new episodes on this YouTube page or on the Origin of Everything's Facebook page. [MMB]

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Based out of the University of Victoria, the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) is dedicated to "explor[ing] all that changes in Canada's mountain landscape" and "understanding the how and why ecosystems, landscapes, human communities change over time." As part of this project, the MLP has collected numerous historic photographs of Canada's mountains, which visitors can examine through the MLP Explorer. On the Explorer, which is accessible from the site's homepage, historic and contemporary photographs alike are organized on a Google Map via a series of pins. Each pin represents a historic photograph. Gray pins contain historic photos and red pins include contemporary photographs (often accompanied by additional field notes), allowing visitors to examine how a particular site has changed over time. Visitors can also search this collection by surveyor. [MMB]

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In 2016, Jonathon Schroeder of the University of Minnesota's Minnesota Population Center published a dataset that contained population estimates for "each U.S. decennial census year, 1790-2010, for all U.S. counties and county equivalents (excluding Puerto Rico and other territories), using spatially fixed 2010 county definitions." This interactive map allows visitors to explore how county populations have grown and changed over time. By dragging their mouse across the screen, visitors can see how county populations changed between 1790 and 2010, illuminating events such as the Westward Expansion and the Great Migration. As this website is careful to note, however, these maps are not entirely accurate: significantly, the U.S. Census often did not count Native American nations. [MMB]

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Freedom, Books, Flowers, and the Moon is a podcast dedicated to "books and ideas" from The Times Literary Supplement. The title of the podcast comes from an Oscar Wilde quote: "With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?" In each episode, TLS editors chat about a different literary or historical topic, often with expert guests. For instance, in the February 22, 2018, episode of the podcast writer Oliver Moody talks about Isaac Newton's eccentricities. Moody recently published an article on the subject in TLS. In another recent episode, biographer Kathryn Hughes talks about Charlotte Bronte and why people are tempted to conflate the author with her most famous character, Jane Eyre. Visitors can check out and listen to all episodes of Freedom, Books, Flowers, and the Moon on this website. [MMB]

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Based on the approximately five hundred prints in the collection of Harvard's Houghton Library, as well as negatives and slides from the Harvard Art Museum's Lyonel Feininger Archive, this website allows visitors to search and browse hundreds of Feininger's photographs created over a period of fifty years. The types of material range from early family snapshots to color slides from the 1940s and '50s. There's also a chronology of Feininger's life from 1871-1956 and a bibliography with links to other exhibitions at Harvard. Feininger's photographic subjects are accompanied by short descriptive summaries. For example, the summary for Bauhaus explains how Feininger first began photographing with artistic intent in 1928 while a master at the Bauhaus. Additionally, there are photographs of the Baltic seacoast where Feininger spent parts of his summers beginning in 1892 and photographs that highlight his persistent interest in photographing shop windows, which began in Weimar Germany and continued in New York City and San Francisco. [DS]

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Originally featured in June 2016, Apollo 17 in Real-Time continues to impress us: Ben Feist's expertly crafted interactive website allows users to explore archival material from NASA's final trip to the Moon.

Apollo 17 in Real-Time is an engrossing interactive website that allows contemporary visitors to experience 1972's Apollo 17 mission, which marked NASA's final trip to the Moon. To craft this website -- a process that took over four years -- creator Ben Feist compiled and made use of various archival material from NASA, including radio broadcasts, thousands of photographs, and over 22 hours of film. The result? A spectacular interactive experience. Upon entering the site, one can listen to the entire radio broadcast of the Apollo 17 mission (over 300 hours total) and simultaneously explore photographs and film from the spacecraft's camera as this visual media corresponds with the audio narrative. As viewers listen to the radio communication between Apollo 17 and ground control, they have the option to read the transcript verbatim or explore commentary that provides helpful context. Viewers can jump to various points of the mission by using a timeline that appears at the top of the page. [MMB]

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Geany is a lightweight integrated development environment. It was designed to be fast and small with a relatively short list of external dependencies. Geany presents a graphical interface reminiscent of heavier-weight editors for Windows-like Programmer's Notepad or Notepad++. Despite its small size (the Windows executable is only 14 MB), Geany supports editing multiple simultaneous documents, auto-completion of functions and variables, code folding, and syntax highlighting for numerous programming and markup languages. It understands CSS, HTML, Javascript, Markdown, PHP, Python, reStrutcturdText, SQL, and many others. Geany has a plugin system that can extend the base editor with additional features. Several dozen plugins are available on the Geany website, adding support for things like in-editor debugging, Git integration, preview of HTML documents, and more. Geany is a free software available under the GNU General Public License. Source code is available on GitHub. Installers for Windows and macOS are available on the Geany website. Most Linux distributions and BSD descendants include Geany installers in their package management systems. [CRH]

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Hypothesis is a web annotation tool, allowing users to attach sentence-level notes to any site on the web. No support is necessary for the underlying websites - Hypothesis functions as an overlay that works everywhere. Hypothesis is produced by a non-profit foundation with a list of sponsors including the Sloan Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and numerous others. Through their work with the W3C Web Annotation Working Group, the Hypothesis project seeks to build not just a working web annotation system, but standards for interoperable annotations of digital documents more generally. Their work is guided by a set of community principles and all their software is available under open source licenses on GitHub. The In Action section of the Hypothesis website provides examples of employing Hypothesis for educators, journalists, scientists, publishers, and the general public. To begin creating annotations, users need to register for an account. Google Chrome users can then utilize a Chrome Extension to interact with Hypothesis. For other browsers, Hypothesis provides a bookmarklet for quick access to the Hypothesis website. [CRH]

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