The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 14

From the University of Iowa's Department of Linguistics comes Madurese Storytellers - a collection of video-recorded folktales from the Madurese, an ethnic community in Indonesia. These folks tales were collected by the late William Davies, who worked as a linguistics professor at the University of Iowa for many years and studied the languages of Indonesia. Videos in this collection are accompanied by a short synopsis in English along with four documents. These documents include a transcription of the story in Madurese alongside translations in English and Indonesian. The fourth document features "an interlinear format which includes morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, the common format for linguistic analysis." Individual folktales are also tagged by topic (including introduction/spread of Islam; origins and names; respectfulness, diligence, and loyalty) to facilitate easy browsing. [MMB]

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The Ancient World Online (AWOL) is a blog by Charles E. Jones, Classics and Humanities Librarian at Penn State University. AWOL is dedicated to "open access material relating to the ancient world." As Jones explains, he adapts his definition of the "ancient world" from NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (visitors will find a link to the institute at the bottom of this blog). For scholars and students interested in the classics, AWOL provides a fabulous one-stop-shop of open-access journals, digital collections, YouTube videos, articles, and other materials that may be of interest. Jones launched AWOL in 2009 and updates his blog several times a week (posting no fewer 115 times in March 2018), offering readers a remarkably extensive collection of resources. [MMB]

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From the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy comes First Draft News: a project dedicated to "fight[ing] mis- and disinformation through fieldwork, research, and education." The project has a number of resources that may be of interest to librarians and educators. Professionals in these fields may want to start by checking out the education section, which contains a number free resources designed for teaching journalism. These include hour-long verification training courses, which visitors may access by creating a free login. The resources section features short educational videos, interactive quizzes, and reading lists. The fieldwork section offers free, extensive field guides including the Field Guide To "Fake News" and Other Information Disorders, a 216-page booklet that "looks at how digital methods, data, tools, techniques and research approaches can be utilized in the service of increasing public understanding of the politics, production, circulation, and responses to fake news online." [MMB]

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What is a "measure of spread" and what does it tell us about a data set? Why are scatter plots useful in comparing two variables? How might you go about designing a controlled experiment? If you are interested in exploring (or teaching) answers to these questions, the Crash Course YouTube channel recently launched Crash Course Statistics - a series of short videos dedicated to helping people make sense of statistics in their lives. This series is hosted by Adriane Hill, a journalist for NPR's Marketplace and the cohost of the Crash Course Economics series. Recent episodes of Crash Course Statistics have examined topics including mean, median, and mode; data visualizations, and how surveys can be biased. New episodes of Crash Course Statistics are released weekly, so stay tuned. As of this writing, the series contains ten episodes. [MMB]

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Founded in 1917, Yale University's Index of Medieval Art is dedicated to "images and information relating to the iconographic traditions of the medieval world." The index, which was originally called the Index of Christian Art, contains 200,000 items dating from the early years of Christianity through the 1500s. Visitors can explore this rich database of images in two ways. In Digital Image Collections, available via the resources tab, images are organized into collections. Included collections are the Jane Hayward Database of Medieval Art, the John Plummer Database of Medieval Manuscripts, and the Gertrude and Robert Metcalf Collection of Images of Stained Glass, to name just a few. Alternatively, visitors may browse or search the database in full via the explore the database tab. Meanwhile, the site's homepage contains a number of insightful short essays that provide context for items in the collections. For example, in one recent blog post, Professor Pamela Patton examines how the hagiography of Saint George and Saint Drogo evolved over time. The Index of Medieval Art is a fabulous resource for students and scholars interested in art and religious studies. [MMB]

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Launched in October 2008 by historian and activist Jonathan Ned Katz (author of the 1976 book Gay American History), OutHistory.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting important individuals in LGBTQ American history. Today, the project is directed by Katz, historian John D'Emilio, historian Claire Bond Potter, public health scholar Randall Sell, and Kimon Keramidas of the Center for Experimental Humanities. On the project's website, visitors can learn more about LGBTQ history through a wealth of short essays and primary documents. Visitors may browse these resources by people (from Macy's executive Leo Adams to film and opera director Franco Zeffirelli), places, or subject (arts & culture; politics, government, and law; science, medicine, and health). Visitors may also browse document collections (including Transgender Children in Antebellum America and Documents and Photographs Related to the Campaign for a Gay Rights Bill in NYC) or view a series of thematic timelines (including the Native American LGBTQ timeline and the Latinx American LGBTQ timeline). Alternatively, visitors may also browse material by type: oral histories, visual materials, and bibliographies. [MMB]

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The Pew Research Center recently released this interactive map that allows visitors to view a series of data visualizations about how migration around the world has evolved between 1990 and 2017. These visualizations are based on data from the United Nations Population Division. This division defines a migrant as "someone who has been living for one year or longer in a country other than the one in which he or she was born," along with, "refugees and, in some cases, their descendants (such as Palestinians born in refugee camps outside of the Palestinian territories)." To use this visualization, visitors can select a year and a country. Next, visitors may select whether they are interested in information about emigration out of that country (labeled "out of" on this map) or immigration into that country (labeled "into"). This interactive map may especially be of interest to geography instructors, along with grant writers, journalists, and others interested in world migration data. The map contains links to previous Pew Research Center articles about the UN Population Division datasets. [MMB]

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Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) take hundreds of night-time pictures each year of cities around the globe. Cities at Night is a "citizen science project that aims to create a map, similar to Google maps, of the Earth at night using night-time color photographs taken by astronauts onboard the ISS." As the project team explains, human expertise is more effective at classifying and geo-referencing these photos than an algorithm. In the maps section of this website, visitors can help the project team with these processes via a series of links (dark skies, lost at night, and night cities). In addition, this section contains photographs that have already been classified and geo-referenced by previous users, which are organized via a series of maps. The Cities at Night project is intended to collect information about light pollution: an issue that visitors may learn more about via the light pollution and research tabs, respectively. [MMB]

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For bird lovers, The E.A. McIlhenny Natural History Museum at Louisiana State University offers this online exhibit dedicated to neotropical ornithology. The exhibit's title comes from 2011 exhibition catalog authored by Tom Taylor and Michael L. Taylor. This online exhibit is an online adaptation of that catalog, offering extensive information about neotropical birds and the history of the study of such birds. In this exhibit, visitors can learn more about dozens of naturalists, museum collectors, individual collectors (including Charles Darwin), and others who studied birds of South and Central America. Visitors can browse these short biographies by category, including traveling naturalists, opening scientific exploration, and modern fieldwork. These biographies are accompanied by a number of fascinating primary documents in addition to gorgeous bird illustrations. [MMB]

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Ordinary Philosophy is a blog and podcast by Amy Cools that is dedicated to the intersections of philosophy and daily life. Cools studied philosophy at Sacramento State University and is currently pursuing a M.Sc. in intellectual history at the University of Edinburgh. Ordinary Philosophy is comprised of four sections. In the history of ideas section, Cools writes about influential thinkers of all stripes, often on the anniversary of their birthday. These tributes are all fully cited and accompanied by suggestions for additional reading. In the philosophy section, visitors may browse previous blog posts by categories such as reviews & recommendations, science, and ethics and morals. The most recent blog posts, authored by Cools and guest bloggers, are available on the site's homepage. Meanwhile, in the traveling philosophy/history of ideas section, Cools describes her travels to sites that were central to the lives of a variety of thinkers and philosophers. Finally, podcast fans can listen to current and past episodes of the Ordinary Philosophy podcast (available via Podomatic and Google Play) in the podcast section. [MMB]

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For anyone interested in the history of healthcare and gender, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (RCOG) offers this fascinating blog. The college was founded in 1929 and is home to library, museum, and archive collections (which it shares with the Royal College of Midwives; see the 09-01-2017 Scout Report) that collectively contains hundreds of documents and records relating to the history of obstetrics and gynecology. This blog recently featured a "Pioneers" series, which highlighted a number of women who played important roles in the college's history. These women include Louise McIlroy, a surgeon and gynecologist who became the first woman to serve on the Royal College's council and Gertrude Dearnley, a doctor who established a fertility clinic at the college in 1937. Another recent post explores the "hidden history of tampons," noting that in 1941 the Tampax company reached out to RCOG president William Fletcher Shaw seeking endorsement that their tampons were safe to use. [MMB]

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For folks interested in the history of print comic books, the Grand Comics Database is a volunteer-run non-profit organization dedicated to creating a virtual database of comic books from around the world. As of this write-up, the database contains over 300,000 comic book issues. Visitors can search this database via a search bar at the top of the website. By selecting the advanced search option, visitors may select a number of filters including available story type (e.g. comic story, promo, character profile) and country. Those interested in contributing to the Grand Comics Database will find a tutorial for doing so in the upper-left corner of the page. [MMB]

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During the nineteenth century, women played an important role in creating works of scientific communication despite their exclusion from the professional world of science. Maria Edgeworth and Sarah Trimmer wrote key texts about scientific methodology, as did a number of lesser-known women (including several who published anonymously.) This online exhibit from the George A. Smathers Library at the University of Florida is dedicated to these important authors and their texts. This online exhibit, which accompanies a 2015 physical exhibit at the library, was curated by Suzan A. Alteri of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature (home to much of the material in this exhibit) and by Dr. Alan Rauch, an English professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. [MMB]

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This section of DigiNole, Florida State University's (FSU) digital collections, consists of 70 e-book versions of herbals and cookbooks dating back to the seventeenth century. The scanned books are equipped with an auto page turner that will turn the pages automatically if viewers choose. It's also possible to turn the pages by hand and jump directly to a particular page. As an example, page 37 of the Farmer Kitchen says, "every recipe contributed by a farmer's wife mother or daughter," which has the recipe for chicken croquettes. Some familiar titles in the collection include several editions of Culpeper's Herbal, and Mrs. Beeton's All about cookery: a collection of practical recipes arranged in alphabetical order. It's also possible to search by keywords and limit by criteria including dates or geographic location, or topics such as botany, cooking, herbs, menus, or philosophy and religion. [DS]

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Seek is a smartphone app designed to encourage and enrich exploration of the outdoors. It uses image recognition to identify plants and animals in photos, providing additional context for people already exploring nature around them. Seek also has a scavenger hunt mode, where it presents lists of commonly-recorded species near the user. As users find and photograph species on this list they earn badges and are presented with information about the species they are locating. Seek's creators recommend it for "families who want to spend more time exploring nature together." Seek is currently available for iOS. An Android version is in development but there is currently no estimated release date. [CRH]

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Unison is a cross-platform tool for synchronizing collections of files over the internet. Unison has the somewhat unique ability to handle updates to multiple copies of a file. For many file formats, it is able to determine if the updates conflict with each other. If they do not, it can create a merged file incorporating changes from both updated versions. Otherwise, it will alert the user to the situation for them to resolve. Unison uses a bandwidth-efficient protocol similar to the well-known rsync program, so it is able to tolerate slow links (like public wifi). Unison is resilient to network failures. It will not corrupt files if synchronization is interrupted and synchronizations can be resumed later. Unison is free software licensed under the GPL with source code available on GitHub. Installers are available from the Unison website for Windows, macOS, and Linux. [CRH]

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Originally featured in our 04-08-2016 issue, Histories of the National Mall allows visitors from around the globe to learn more about the historic Washington, D.C. site.

One end of the National Mall is anchored by the Washington Monument, an immense and beautiful obelisk that has been mostly closed to the public since it was damaged by an earthquake in 2011. The Washington Monument re-opened May 12, 2016, but, in advance of that event, this website created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University with funding provided by the National Endowment from the Humanities, allows for an investigation of the Monument's history, as well as a look at other structures lining the National Mall. The website may be experienced in many different ways. Visitors have the option to begin with a map of 345 historical events related to the mall and plotted geographically. Another pathway is Explorations - almost an FAQ - with materials organized to answer questions such as, "Has anyone ever lived on the Mall?"; "Was the Mall ever used for farmland?"; and "Were there any alternate designs for the Washington Monument?" Start with the people section to learn about the connections between people and the National Mall, including Marian Anderson, Daniel Burnham, and Thomas Jefferson. There's also a search function, and a quick search on Washington Monument provides a list of 36 information items, including background on the 2011 earthquake and Benjamin Henry Latrobe's never-built 1799 design for the Monument.

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