The Scout Report -- Volume 24, Number 47

Researchers and students in geography, science, and technology studies may be interested in Indigenous STS, part of the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. This "international research and teaching hub [...] for the bourgeoning sub-field" of Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (STS) is led by its principal investigator Kim TallBear, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. Here, readers can listen to Media Indigena, a weekly roundtable conversation "about Indigenous issues and events in Canada and beyond" featuring Native faculty members such as TallBear, Kenneth Williams, and Candis Callison. In this lively podcast, the roundtablers discuss a wide variety of contemporary topics and draw on their perspectives as both academics and Indigenous people. Recent discussion topics include the colonial legacies in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, Canada's recent marijuana legalization and its implications for Indigenous communities, and trends in education towards "Indigenization" and what that term might actually mean. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

For science educators, Bear Trust International provides an excellent set of free teaching materials centered around wildlife conservation. These well-developed, standards-aligned lesson plans incorporate real-world data and put students in the role of wildlife scientists for an interactive learning experience that addresses the complexities of these frequently thorny issues. Some lessons, like "Grizzly Bears: Ready for Delisting?" are intended for high school students, while others, such as "Bighorn Sheep: On the Edge?" are written for grades 7-8. In some lessons, such as "Wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains," students use free GIS software to analyze data and map wildlife with all necessary instructions included. It should be noted that answer keys for Bear Trust's lessons are password-protected and educators can email the organization to request access to the keys (for free) if they so desire. Bear Trust International, a nonprofit organization based in Bozeman, Montana, "works to conserve all eight species of the world's bears, other wildlife, and habitat." [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Higher education administrators, educators, IT specialists, and policymakers may be interested in this report and supporting materials published in October 2018 by the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR). These resources provide "findings from the 2018 student study in the EDUCAUSE Technology Research in the Academic Community research series [which] explores technology ownership, use patterns, and expectations as they relate to the student experience." This research was based on a survey of 64,536 undergraduate students at 130 institutions in nine countries and 36 US states. Topics covered include campus Wi-Fi experiences, experiences with instructors and technology, and institutional awareness of student disability and accessibility. Those interested may read the full 47-page report in both PDF and HTML format. Also available on this site is an infographic highlighting the 2018 survey findings, the survey questions, an almanac of survey data, and slides and transcripts from a webinar presenting the report's findings. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

History professors, students, and general aficionados will likely appreciate Reviews in History, a publication of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Launched in 1996, Reviews in History publishes in-depth "reviews and reappraisals of significant work in all fields of historical interest." At the time of this writing, Reviews in History has published over 2,300 reviews, many of which include responses from the author. The scope of this resource is broad and visitors may browse and search the reviews by geographical area, type of history, or time period. Examples of recently reviewed works include the books Imaging Stuart Family Politics: Dynastic Crisis and Continuity by Catriona Murray and Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive by Camilla Townsend. While monographs are the most frequently reviewed format, Reviews in History also publishes reviews of digital resources, films, textbooks, and exhibitions. From time to time, Reviews in History publishes special issues centered around themes such as urban history, fashion, and historical fiction. Those interested may subscribe to email alerts of new reviews. Reviews in History is edited by Jo Fox, the director of the Institute of Historical Research, with Danny Millum as its deputy editor. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

STEM educators may want to peruse this collection of classroom resources offered by the American Nuclear Society (ANS). These resources include classroom experiments and lesson plans, as well as downloadable fact sheets and posters. Most are intended for students in grades 5-12 and are aligned with Next Generation Science Standards. Examples of activities include making an electroscope out of household objects to detect static electricity, a half-life lab using candy to model the concept of radioactive decay, and a mini Rutherford activity where students "try to determine the shape of an unknown object by using the scientific thought process of creating a hypothesis, then testing it through inference." This collection could be improved by categorization for easier browsing, and while many of the resources here are available for free, this site also lists some that are available for purchase. However, the free gems here make this site worth the effort. These educational materials are hosted by the Center for Nuclear Science and Technology Information, an outreach initiative of the ANS that seeks to "encourage and inspire fun nuclear education for K-12 students [and] help people learn the many benefits that nuclear science and technology brings to their lives." [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides researchers and students interested in studying changes over time access to "population, housing, agricultural, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for geographic units in the United States from 1790 to the present." Visitors to this well-organized and regularly updated resource can use its data finder to filter by geographic levels, years, topics, and datasets, then download their selected data in one request. NGHIS also provides a number of helpful user resources, such as a user's guide, a thorough FAQ section, and a link to a user forum, to assist users in accessing and using the data. Also included is extensive documentation of summary tables, GIS files, and time series tables contained in this database. NHGIS is a data integration project of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), which is part of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, and it is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

K-12 teachers looking to engage their students in critical thought about the world today may appreciate this collection of lesson plans created by TeachRock. Here, they will find standards-aligned lesson plans that use "contemporary pop music as an entry point into a wide variety of topics." For example, one lesson uses P!nk's song "What About Us?" to review the major events of 2017 and discuss the relationship between music and current events. In another lesson, students use the song "Something Like This" by Coldplay and The Chainsmokers as a jumping off point for exploring similarities between gods from classical mythology and modern superheroes. Lessons typically incorporate music videos and some also include downloadable charts from Little Kids Rock for various instruments. A free account is needed to access all of the lesson plans. TeachRock is a project of the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, which was founded by actor and musician Steven Van Zandt "in response to a drop-out crisis he saw crippling American education." It is endorsed by the National Council for the Social Studies, the National Council for Geographic Education, and the National Association for Music Education. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Readers interested in the Indigenous histories of North America and beyond may enjoy exploring Native Land, an ongoing interactive mapping project that attempts to outline ancestral Indigenous territories. Here, visitors will find a colorful map multilayered with depictions of where different Indigenous peoples historically lived. Users can browse the map itself or search for a particular postal code to see whose territories that location falls within, and clicking on a given territory shows the names of the native people(s) and cession treaties associated with that place with links to sources included. Launched in 2015, Native Land is the brainchild and passion project of Victor Temprano, a web developer based in Vancouver and self-described "settler." Temprano, who freely acknowledges his map's shortcomings, created Native Land in the hopes of "helping people get interested and engaged" with this topic, and states that he is "concerned about many of the issues raised by using maps and colonial ways of thinking when it comes to maps." The project's blog provides insight into the methodologies behind Native Land and its future directions, and the teacher's guide page offers advice for thinking critically about this map along with links to further reading. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Those who relish a thought-provoking, intellectual read should check out this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, which compiles 21 responses from a range of scholars to the question "What's the most influential book of the past 20 years?" Respondents were asked "to select books -- academic or not, but written by scholars -- from within or outside their own fields," and their choices and explanations are presented here. For example, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, chose Arthur C. Danto's What Art Is, saying that, "Both art and philosophy have become increasingly marginal in the life of the university. Reading Danto reminds us that art and the critical consideration of the aesthetic ought not remain the poor stepchildren of the academy." In another example, Deborah Tannen, a history professor at Georgetown University, chose Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. As Tannen points out, "Even people who didn't read the book's 500-plus pages through to the end -- or didn't read it at all -- are aware of its thesis. That's what influence is all about." [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Aspiring writers and readers who love narrative journalism and nonfiction may particularly appreciate Nieman Storyboard, a publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. This resource "showcases exceptional narrative journalism and explores the future of nonfiction storytelling," offering readers a unique view into great journalism and how it came into being. Nieman Storyboard features a number of regular columns, such as Why's This So Good?, which recently delved into Lizzie Johnson's reporting on the Camp Fire for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Annotation Tuesday!, which gives readers an inside peek into the journalistic process through questions and answers with a story's writer or editor alongside the finished piece. In addition to these and other regular sections, Nieman Storyboard "also features interviews with writers, coverage of literary conferences and events, and posts on narrative technique from veteran storytellers." Nieman Storyboard is edited by Jacqui Banaszynski, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. Interested readers can subscribe to receive weekly updates via email or RSS feed. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Readers interested in curious cartographies may enjoy this unusual interactive map of Ohio created by professional cartographer Andy Woodruff. While the map's appearance is fairly conventional, what sets it apart is that Woodruff, upon realizing that Ohio has 88 counties, assigned each county to correspond to one of a piano's 88 keys based on census data, thus turning Ohio into a cartographic musical instrument of sorts. Users can choose a census attribute, such as population per square mile or percent renter-occupied units, then "play" the map by mousing over the counties. Other options include playing a route between two cities, all the counties as a chromatic scale, or the song "The Entertainer." This version is actually Woodruff's second iteration of this project, which had to be rebuilt in HTML and Javascript after Google Maps for Flash stopped working. Those interested in the back story of this map will find a link to Woodruff's initial version with additional commentary at the beginning of this blog post. It should be noted that using this map requires a desktop computer, as it will not work on mobile devices, and that headphones may be appropriate if exploring this map in public. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Did you know that the British Library's vast collections also include a wide variety of wildlife sounds? In the web presentation The Language of Birds, recordings from the library's sound collections, along with photographs, accompany a series of accessibly-written articles that explore and illustrate why and how birds communicate. Here, interested readers can learn about birdsong and how it differs from bird calls, the physiology of birds' vocalizations and hearing, how birds learn to sing and mimic, and the non-vocal ways that birds use sound to communicate (such as a woodpecker's drumming). This presentation includes a total of 15 articles, as well as 53 sound recordings with accompanying images featuring songbirds such as the nightingale and chaffinch, as well as other species such as parrots, peacocks, and ruffed grouse. The Language of Birds was written by Jeffery Boswall, a natural history broadcaster with the BBC, and originally published in Proceedings of the Royal Institution. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Art experts and aficionados who have not already discovered The Modern Art Notes Podcast (MAN) have been missing out. Every week since 2011, this highly acclaimed podcast has been treating its listeners to in-depth interviews with artists, curators, historians, and conservators, generally in two segments per hour-long episode. As of this writing, the MAN Podcast has well over three hundred episodes in its archives. One recent episode, for example, features a conversation with artist Laurie Simmons about her current exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and with Allegra Pesenti, curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, discussing an exhibition of Victor Hugo's drawings. Each episode is accompanied by images and links to further information and the podcast's back-catalog is well worth exploring. The Pulitzer-winner art critic Sebastian Smee has called the MAN Podcast "one of the great archives of the art of our time." The MAN Podcast is hosted and produced by the award-winning art critic and historian Tyler Green. Listeners can subscribe via RSS, iTunes, Stitcher, and other podcast platforms, or tune in on its website. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Underground tunnels are a familiar feature in many of the world's major cities and they offer a fascinating lens through which to view their city's history, geography, and culture. One such city is Washington, D.C., which features an extensive tunnel system dating back to the mid-1800s. The D.C. Underground Atlas provides its visitors with an interactive digital guide to this tunnel system, much of which is physically inaccessible to the public. This series of engaging StoryMaps, accompanied by several articles and numerous photographs, allows visitors to virtually explore Washington, D.C.'s underground networks of transportation, utility, and pedestrian tunnels, and learn about their role in the city's history. The atlas' information was largely sourced from publicly available utility maps, newspaper archives, and government documents. The D.C. Underground Atlas was created in 2018 by Elliot Carter, an amateur cartographer who writes about D.C.'s hidden history for Atlas Obscura, and is supported by a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. [JDC]

Comment on or rate this resource

Mattermost is an open source, real-time, self-hosted chat, and collaboration system. It is frequently described as an alternative to Slack that can be run on one's own infrastructure. Similar to Slack, users access a Mattermost server either from a browser, a dedicated desktop chat client, or one of several mobile applications. Mattermost channels support embedded images and files. Channels are grouped into teams and are managed by team admins. Membership within a channel can be public, restricted to users from specific email providers, or by invitation only. A number of bots and integrations are available for Mattermost and more can be created with the Mattermost REST API. Detailed information on how to do so is available in their developer documentation. In the administrator's guide, users can find instructions for installing the Mattermost server on Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS, among others. Mattermost can also be deployed to a number of cloud providers using Bitnami. In addition to the free, open-source release of Mattermost, an enterprise version that includes additional features for large organizations (single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, etc.) is also available for purchase. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

HTML_CodeSniffer is a coding standards checker for websites. Users can run HTML_CodeSniffer inside their browser by adding a bookmarklet to their bookmarks bar. The sample public version will check a site for conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0. Users simply visit a site and click their CodeSniffer bookmark to generate an interactive report of any issues found. As users select individual issues within the report, CodeSniffer indicates the relevant visual element on the page, displays the problematic markup and offers a link to suggested techniques for resolving the issue. Developers can clone the BSD-licensed HTML_CodeSniffer source from GitHub and create their own customized versions that include any additional checks they want. The HTML_CodeSniffer bookmarklet works in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Additional ways of running HTML_CodeSniffer, including command-line use with a headless browser, are described on the GitHub page. [CRH]

Comment on or rate this resource

We originally featured The Sporkful in the 1/20/2017 Scout Report. The Sporkful now includes a spinoff series, "Ask Mimi," which features advice from the celebrated food critic Mimi Sheraton, and it was the 2018 winner of the James Beard Award for Best Food Podcast.

Online since 2009, The Sporkful is the creation of Dan Pashman, presented in partnership with NPR-affiliate WNYC. The tagline for The Sporkful is "it's not for foodies, it's for eaters," and it can be consumed in a variety of ways (all calorie-free), as long as you only partake of the digital versions. Visitors can head for the website to browse and listen to the approximately 30-minute podcasts there. One recent episode "follow[s] Cincinnati chili from Sri Lanka to Greece to the American Midwest," while a shorter bonus episode talks to dairy farmer Katie Dotterer-Pyle about "why all her cows wear FitBits." Readers can subscribe via most podcast platforms, and of course, there's a WNYC app that features The Sporkful. The website also links to videos by Pashman, such as "Behold the ORIGINAL Veggieducken, Your Meatless Thanksgiving Centerpiece Dish," a video portrait of a dish created by Pashman using winter squash, leeks, and sweet potatoes, so that vegetarians would have "a large, time-consuming, centerpiece-worthy dish to prepare at the holidays."

Comment on or rate this resource