The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 10

Launched in 2012 and headed by English professor Paul Schacht, Digital Thoreau is a digital humanities project from SUNY Geneseo that allows English scholars and others to read and discuss texts by Henry David Thoreau. As of this write-up, Digital Thoreau includes three major projects. The first is Walden: A Fluid Text Edition, which allows readers to examine how Thoreau revised and rewrote Walden between 1847 and 1854. This project allows readers to compare two of eight editions of Walden side-by-side and examine a number of meticulous notes about how the text was revised. Meanwhile, the Reader's Thoreau project invites participants to annotate and discuss Thoreau's work with one another. Reader's Thoreau currently includes Thoreau's 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government" and 1862 article "Walking," in addition to Walden. Finally, visitors may also check out the Days of Walter Harding: "a digital archive of the life and work of Walter Harding, an eminent Thoreau Scholar." [MMB]

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During World War II, black women interested in serving as army nurses faced the dual obstacles of sexism and racism. The Army Nurse Corps (ANC) was initially reluctant to allow women to join at all. Once women were admitted to the corps, the ANC allowed just 500 black nurses to serve in the then-segregated U.S. Army. The Tuskegee Army Nurses Project, directed by Pia Marie Winters Jordan, Assistant Professor of Multimedia Journalism at Morgan State University, is dedicated to the experiences and contributions of the women who served as nurses at the Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF). Jordan has a personal connection to the TAAF nurses: her mother, Louise Virginia Lomax Winters, served as a nurse and First Lieutenant at TAAF. On this website, visitors can read biographies of TAAF nurses and explore a variety of multimedia material. These materials include photographs, an extended interview with Jordan, and a short interview with a Tuskegee Airman about the importance of the TAAF nurses. [MMB]

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The Brain Scoop YouTube channel is directed and hosted by Emily Graslie - she launched Brain Scoop in 2012 and currently serves as the Chief Curiosity Correspondent at the Field Museum. Brain Scoop videos explore a variety of life science topics ranging from fossils to millipedes to biomechanics. Graslie often visits with science researchers in these episodes, providing viewers with a variety of expert perspectives. In other episodes, Graslie answers questions from viewers or chats about different aspects of the scientific research process. As Graslie warns her viewers, Brain Scoop is not always for the squeamish: some episodes (such as those featuring decisions) are accompanied by a "grossometer" that cautions viewers about their contents. Some previous Brain Scoop episodes are organized into playlists, enabling educators and others to locate episodes of interest with ease. [MMB]

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Thomas Bodley (1545- 1613) is most well-known for founding Oxford's Bodleian Library. Bodley also served as a diplomat between 1595 and 1597, traveled to a number of European sovereigns, and represented England in the Council of the State for the United Provinces in the Netherlands between 1588 and 1597. The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) at the University College London, in collaboration with the Bodleian Library, has digitized Bodley's diplomatic correspondence. This collection provides great insight into late-sixteenth-century European politics. Visitors can browse this collection by author or recipients (a list that includes Queen Elizabeth, Anthony Bacon, and Robert Cecil, among others). Alternatively, visitors may browse letters by location, people mentioned, or places mentioned. In addition, letters are arranged chronologically on a timeline in the dates section. The editorial section contains essays that provide historical context to this remarkable collection. Finally, the project boasts a number of interesting data visualizations, including social network analyses. [MMB]

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The Museum of Science, Boston presents Engineering Everywhere: a collection of free curricular materials designed for middle school studies. These materials are designed specifically for youth working in out-of-school learning environments such as after-school programs, summer camps, museums, and libraries. Each Engineering Everywhere unit is designed to engage young learners with authentic challenges faced by contemporary engineers. For example, in the Water Reuse unit, students learn about the importance of reusing water and design techniques for reusing water through hands-on activities. Other Engineering Everywhere units address topics including responding to pandemics, urban landscaping, insulating homes, and bioplastics. Educators can access all curricular materials by completing a free registration. [MMB]

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The NYC Archeology Repository (a project of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee) offers a number of educational resources designed to engage students with archeology. While many of these resources are designed with New York City K-12 Social Studies teachers in mind, some of these resources may also appeal more broadly to educators interested in incorporating archeology into existing curriculum. A highlight of these resources is a collection of interactive quizzes designed to engage learners with items from the repository. In these quizzes, learners are invited to try and identify items in the NYC repository, from cannonballs to hair combs, or to identify the age of certain artifacts. The section entitled Ideas for Teachers contains information about how archeology aligns with the Common Core and links to two outside websites (from the Smithsonian Institute and the National Park Service, respectively). [MMB]

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RIDE is an open-access, online journal published by the Institute of Documentary and Scholarly Editing (IDE) - a German organization dedicated to the digital humanities. The journal is dedicated to "provid[ing] a framework of evaluation for digital scholarly editions and...digital text collections." As the team behind this journal notes, although the number of digital editions and text collections have grown rapidly in the past several years, these projects are rarely subject to the kind of critical review as traditional, print-based humanities scholarship. Launched in 2014, the journal is edited and reviewed by an international team of digital humanities scholars. In keeping with this global focus RIDE publishes articles in both English and German (Issue 8, the most recent issue of the journal, featured four articles authored in English and one in German) and features reviews of multilingual digital resources. Visitors may access all current and previous RIDE articles online and download articles of interest in PDF format. [MMB]

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The Allen County Public Library of Fort Wayne, Indiana offers a daily Audio Reading Service Podcast, which is, "specifically designed for and directed to people who have visual, physical, learning, or language challenges to reading traditional printed materials." Here, visitors will find audio recordings of a number of popular news sources, ranging from The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Discover Science, Economist, and much more. The history of this podcast dates back to 1979 when it began as the Northeast Indiana Radio Reading Service (NEIRRS). Today, the show continues to be broadcast locally and features a number of news publications local to the Indiana/Ohio region in addition to national and international news sources. On this website, visitors can browse audio recordings by category, including newspapers, magazines, sports, and entertainment. The podcast is updated several times a day with recently published material. [MMB]

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From the Wisconsin Historical Society comes the Wisconsin Sound Archive: "an ongoing effort to digitize and make the audio heritage from and about the state of Wisconsin available to the public online." This recently launched collection features oral history interviews, radio broadcasts, and radio advertisements. As of this write-up, the archive features a variety of single recordings as well as collections of related material. These collections include the Wisconsin Communities radio broadcasts, which profiled a variety of Wisconsin cities during the 1950s. This series was part of Wisconsin College of the Air, a series of educational programming launched in 1931 at UW-Madison's WHA station. The archive also features select oral history collections. In the Oral History of Plant Closings in Milwaukee collection, recorded in 2015, visitors can hear Milwaukee residents describe the impact of 1970s deindustrialization on Milwaukee's African-American community. Meanwhile, the Beloit Bicentennial Oral History Project features a series of 1976 interviews with Beloit residents. Recordings that include indexes or transcripts link out to a separate page that allows you to search keywords and jump to the correlating points within the audio, making searching within recordings for a specific topic easy and interactive. The team behind the Wisconsin Sound Archive is continuing to expand the project and is in the process of adding additional recordings - including environmental recordings, speeches, and conferences - to the collection, so stay tuned. [MMB]

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The Library of Congress's Cities and Towns collection features over 3,000 digitized maps of cities and towns. While the majority of these maps portray U.S. cities, the collection also includes maps of cities in China, Brazil, Canada, and a handful of other countries. Visitors can browse this fascinating collection by year (approximately 2,000 of these maps date from the nineteenth century; the entire collection ranges in date from the year 1223 through the present). Visitors can also browse by location, contributor, or subject. The collection includes real estate maps, atlases, and much more. Among the many treasures in this collection are: a colorful 1589 map of St. Augustine, Florida created by Baptista Boazio; a plan for the city of New Orleans, drafted up by Jacques Nicolas Bellin in 1764; and an 1896 atlas of New York from the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. [MMB]

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From BBC Radio 4 comes More or Less - a broadcast that aims to offer a "statistical guide to the world and everything else." The show is hosted by Tim Harford and released twice a week. In each episode, Harford discusses the statistics quoted in recent news stories and new research. For example, one recent episode investigates a recent claim from Russia's health ministry that alcohol consumption in the country has declined by 80% in the past five years. Another recent episode considers various ways to calculate national success at the Winter Olympics. Each episode of "More or Less" is approximately 11 minutes in length. Visitors can access all current and past episodes on this website. [MMB]

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In the past several decades, the rapid growth of the internet and social media platforms have accelerated linguistic evolution. Words have been replaced and supplemented by emojis and the new words (such as the portmanteau "mansplaining") are able to spread faster than ever before. At the same time, technology has also reshaped how lexicographers research and document language. Andrew Dickson recently published this compelling and informative long-form essay in The Guardian that examines the history and future of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). At the heart of this essay are the ways in which technology has reshaped lexicography. To contextualize these recent changes, Dickson traces the history of the OED back to 1664, when England's Royal Society first formed a committee dedicated to "Improving the English Language." This committee sparked a series of dictionary projects, including one launched by Richard Chenevix Trench in 1857 that became affiliated with Oxford University in 1879. Dickson also chronicles the rise of the "corpus linguistics" movement in the 1960s, which emphasized how words evolve over time in society. To learn more, check out the full essay. [MMB]

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National Geographic recently created this gorgeous, interactive story map that tracks the migration patterns of seven species of birds: the wood thrush, the western tanager, the white-throated sparrow, the magnolia warbler, the fork-tailed flycatcher, the broad-winged hawk, and the greater yellowlegs. Visitors have a chance to listen to a short recording of each of these birds and view an animation of each bird's migratory pattern. These short animations are accompanied by a series of short descriptions that trace each stop in the bird's migratory path. These fascinating animations are based on data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which incorporates data from the citizen science project eBird. [MMB]

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Novelist Henry James was an art lover - he incorporated stories about artists in his novels and he counted artists John Singer Sargent, Elizabeth Boott, John La Farge, and others among his friends. The Morgan Library and Museum has created this online exhibit to accompany its recent gallery exhibit Henry James and the American Painting, which ran from June 9- September 10, 2017. In this online exhibit, visitors can explore a number of items featured in this exhibit, accompanied by audio commentary by the novelist Colm Toibin (who co-curated the exhibit). These items include John Singer Sargent's 1913 portrait of James; Hendrick Christian Andersen's 1899 statue Count Alberto Bevilacqua (which James purchased from the artist); and an 1862 portrait of James by John La Farge; among other works of art. The collection also contains correspondence from James to both Andersen and La Farge. Collectively, this exhibit "elucidates the connections between one of the supreme novelists of his age and the artists and works of art that nourished and inspired his fiction." [MMB]

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The University of North Carolina's Rare Book Collection is home to the Bowman Grey Collection, which features hundreds of "war-themed cards produced in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. during World War One (1914-1918)." The collection includes postcards that feature war photographs, portraits of military officers, political cartoons, poetry, illustrations, and more. This collection will eventually include over 6,000 postcards. As of this write-up, visitors may browse 530 postcards by subject (e.g., flags, military uniforms, children); by Name (e.g., William II), or by place. As noted in the introduction to this collection, these postcards offer a glimpse into the communication and propaganda efforts regarding World War I and offer insight into the role of print culture in spreading news and perspectives about the war. [MMB]

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This online exhibition explores how photography was used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to document large crowds of people and their impacts. This collection was curated by Photoconsortium: the International Consortium for Photographic Heritage, in partnership with Europeana. When navigating to the Power to the People tab, and selecting the "Standing out" section, visitors can explore May Day in Red Square in Moscow, May 5th, 1936, where millions of civilians followed a military parade that marched past Lenin's Tomb. Other festive occasions depicted in the exhibition include the Hans Christian Andersen feast in Odense, Sweden, July 1930; fashionable spectators at Finals Day at Henley Royal Regatta on the Thames River, July 8, 1938; and Arsenal versus Charlton at Highbury Stadium, London, 1936, which shows a sea of men and boys watching the football. Rights information is provided for all the images, so it's easy for viewers to see that the May Day picture is in copyright (meaning commercial reuse is not permitted) while the Hans Christian Andersen picture is available under CC-BY - more liberal terms that allow reuse with attribution. [DS]

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My Simpleshow is a tool for building short "explainer" videos. It includes a number of template storylines that users can select as a starting point. For example, their educational templates include "explain a mathematical formula," "interpret literature," "introduce a biological process," and others. There are also professional storylines (like "introduce your startup") and personal storylines (like "invite someone to an event"). After selecting a storyline, users flesh out the template script with their specific details, select illustrations, and graphics, and select a soundtrack. A number of sample explainer videos can be found under "examples" in the menu at the top right of the site. My Simpleshow is free for personal or classroom use. A variety of paid plans are also available for business use. My Simpleshow works in any modern browser. [CRH]

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DB Browser is a graphical interactive tool to explore the contents of Oracle and MySQL databases. Users need not write any SQL commands to view the contents of a database. An SQL command window is provided for users that want one, but its use is optional. Database records can be interactively added, updated, or deleted also without writing any SQL commands. Similarly, table columns can be interactively added or removed. DB Browser can also export data as CSV or PDF files. DB Browser is a free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License, with source code available on their download pages. Installers are available for Microsoft Windows and macOS. A Java .jar file is also available that should run on any platform where a Java virtual machine is available. [CRH]

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Since we last featured the Chirurgeon's Apprentice in the 08-12-2016 Scout Report, medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris has published the book, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. The book recently garnered the Pen/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Prize. Visitors can learn more about her book-- and the sometimes sordid history of medicine-- on Fitzharris's blog.

According to Lindsey Fitzharris, a medical historian with a Ph.D. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the University of Oxford, "[a]t the beginning of the 17th century, 'chirurgeons' [surgeons] were closely related to barbers and other craftsmen who learned their trade through apprenticeships." Fitzharris's website, which is not for the faint of heart, chronicles this early history of surgery before the field became an established medical practice. On the site's blog, readers can learn about the history of bloodletting and cadaver dissections. Readers can also read the story of Mary I's "phantom pregnancy," discover the toxic ingredients of seventeenth-century make-up, or hear Fitzharris's reflections on changing views of death throughout history. This website also includes a link to Fitzharris's YouTube series, Under the Knife, a collection of short videos about medical history. Instructors and parents should note that this website contains some mature content, specifically relating to the violent treatment of alleged criminals and the history of sexuality.

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