The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 1

The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is an international community of approximately one thousand scientists dedicated to researching various aspects of carbon within the Earth across a wide range of disciplines. DCO's research is organized into four broad themes, each with a link on the main page: extreme physics and chemistry, reservoirs and fluxes, deep energy, and deep life. Scientists may like to explore DCO's data portal, which is a "searchable repository of data, datasets, and publications for helping to advance deep carbon science," as well as DCO's resources for early-career scientists. Science instructors may find their resources for educators helpful, which include downloadable modeling tools, educational videos, infographics, lectures, and webinars. Readers from all backgrounds may enjoy browsing content under DCO's science tab as well as their news section, which features hundreds of stories about DCO's decade of study. For example, in December 2018, DCO scientists reported that their research indicates the deep subterranean Earth contains far more life than previously believed, constituting "245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface." Launched in 2009, DCO was established through seed funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. [JDC]

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With researchers and experts sprawling across its nineteen museums, nine research centers, and the National Zoo, the Smithsonian Institution has grown to become "the world's largest museum, education, and research complex." For the first time, the Smithsonian Institution has created a central, searchable directory of their scholarly experts. Launched in October 2018, Smithsonian Profiles is a tool that "outlines the expertise of current Smithsonian-affiliated scholars, connecting its audiences with curators, historians, researchers, and fellows who continually discover new knowledge to share worldwide." Visitors to Smithsonian Profiles can search this resource by keyword or use the interactive map on the main page to choose among the institution's numerous experts currently located in 120 countries and regions. Each researcher highlighted in Smithsonian Profiles has an individual profile page that includes information such as their research projects, educational background, a list of recent research publications, research grants, and awards. While the basic profiles are created automatically from the Smithsonian databases, scholars have the ability to add to their displayed information. As this new tool becomes more widely used, its value to both its visitors and the Smithsonian experts will become even greater. [JDC]

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Map aficionados, scholars, and general audiences alike may be interested in ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. This fascinating project is an interactive model of the Roman Empire that "reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity," including movement by road, river, and sea with multiple travel modes available for each. ORBIS consists of 632 locations and covers approximately four million square miles of territory, creating a multi-modal network model of the Roman Empire that allows visitors to gain a more accurate understanding of how people, goods, and information flowed in ancient Rome. For new users, ORBIS provides an extensive introduction and tutorial explaining the research behind the model and how to use it to map routes between different locations. Visitors can also find examples of scholarly articles and working papers that incorporate ORBIS into their research. Users may also create their own maps, cartograms, or diagrams in ORBIS and export them as vector files. ORBIS was created collaboratively between an interdisciplinary team at Stanford University led by historian Walter Scheidel and digital humanities specialist Elijah Meeks. Visitors to this site may want to note that this site works best in Chrome and Safari browsers. [JDC]

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Across the United States, universities and colleges have been partnering with cultural institutions such as museums, historical societies, and state and local agencies to create publicly-engaged humanities projects. Humanities for All, a new initiative of the National Humanities Alliance Foundation, provides a database of over 1,500 public humanities programs throughout the country, showcasing a "wide range of humanities projects that engage with diverse publics as audiences and as partners." Visitors can search the database by keyword and filter the projects by the type of higher education institution, type of community partner, project theme, discipline, or state. Each cataloged public humanities project is categorized into at least one of the following groups: outreach, engaged research, engaged teaching, engaged public programming, and the infrastructure of engagement. About fifty projects have full profiles and the remaining have thumbnail descriptions, as well as links to every project's website. Humanities for All is based on a survey conducted in 2017-2018 and led by Daniel Fischer, a project director and postdoctoral fellow at the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. [JDC]

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Photographer and photojournalist Diana Mara Henry documented many of the outstanding events of the late twentieth century in the US, from Vietnam War protests and the women's rights movement to the 1972 Democratic National Convention, as well as portraits of many prominent people, including politicians, musicians, activists, and artists. In the 1980s, Henry purchased 100 acres of land near Esopus Creek, a tributary of the Hudson River in Ulster County, New York, and began investigating food issues and the Permaculture Movement. Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts Amherst presents this web exhibition showcasing photographs and documents from their Diana Mara Henry Collection, such as Henry's press passes, articles, and reading lists for courses she took. Visitors to this site will also find information (all accompanied by photographs) about Henry's early and professional life, photographic assignments during political movements in New York City, and Henry's involvement in social movements throughout the 1970s and 80s. [DS]

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With over 250 years of gathered knowledge, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is one of the world's leaders in the field of botany. One of Kew's recent initiatives is Plants of the World Online (POWO). Launched in March 2017, POWO is a digital portal with an aim to "enable users to access information on all the world's known seed-bearing plants by 2020." Visitors to this project will find a well-designed, searchable database containing (at the time of this write-up) over 1.1 million plant names from around the world, more than 65,000 detailed descriptions, and nearly 200,000 images. Readers can search POWO by a plant's common, species, genus, or family name, and they can also search by descriptive words, such as colors. This ongoing project launched with an initial focus on "key tropical African Floras - Flora Zambesiaca, Flora of West Tropical Africa and Flora of Tropical East Africa specifically," with plans to have global coverage by 2020 as more of Kew's vast collections are digitized over time. POWO is led by Abigail Barker, Kew's Head of Biodiversity Informatics and Spatial Analysis. [JDC]

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Science educators looking for ways to inspire interest in their students about plants may want to check out Botany Depot. Launched in early 2018, this resource describes itself as "a global website for creative ideas and materials for teaching botany in the 21st century for all ages and levels." Botany Depot is created and run by Lena Struwe, Professor of Plant Biology and Director of the Chrysler Herbarium at Rutgers University. Here, visitors will find a wide variety of botanical teaching ideas and resources, ranging from engaging videos to interactive lesson plans, all freely available. Examples include a teacher's guide for a botanical role-playing game centered on "toxic plants in the emergency room," which includes downloadable classroom worksheets and information on 55 different toxic plants. The teacher's guide also serves as an introductory manual of plant nomenclature created for beginning and intermediate botany learners, which covers wild, agricultural, and horticultural species and also includes PowerPoint slides of the figures in the manual for classroom use. Most of the resources shared by Botany Depot at this point were developed with college students in mind, but they could also be helpful for other educational levels or for naturalists and general plant enthusiasts. [JDC]

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Native American Ethnobotany offers visitors a comprehensive "database of plants used as drugs, foods, dyes, fibers, and more, by Native Peoples of North America." This searchable database is the result of more than 25 years of work and contains over 44,000 items, which "represents uses by 291 Native American groups of 4,029 species from 243 different plant families." Visitors can do a simple text search, but for more precision, they can also conduct a filtered search allowing them to specify tribe and plant use in addition to the text search. Visitors will also find lists of all the tribes and plant species contained in the database, each linking to all their documented plant uses. The database includes links to the USDA PLANTS database in the details of each plant-use documentation, thus providing immediate access to the plants' complete botanical information. The current version of Native American Ethnobotany is supported by Dan Moerman, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Jason Best, Director of Biodiversity Informatics at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, with funding from the National Science Foundation. [JDC]

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Throughout the history of botany, scientific illustration has been an essential component of cataloging and studying the world's plants. Botanical Art & Artists offers visitors an in-depth compendium of resources and information on botanical art and illustration that casual enthusiasts, aspiring artists, and academic botanists all can appreciate. This well-organized, comprehensive website includes informative sections on the history of botanical illustration and on the top contemporary botanical artists and illustrators from around the world (organized by continent). Those interested in acquiring botanical drawing or painting skills would do well to peruse the education and materials sections, while professional botanical artists should check out the exhibitions and groups sections. Readers from all backgrounds can benefit from the botany and gardens sections, where they will find useful information on topics such as plant morphology, ways to record or document plants, and botanic gardens and herbaria around the world. Readers will also find abundant links to other relevant external resources throughout the site. Botanical Art & Artists is created and maintained by Katherine Tyrrell, a UK-based writer and artist with a background in education. [JDC]

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For educators interested in establishing a teaching garden at their school, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) offers a wonderful online resource to help get started. School Gardening 101 is a free online teaching resource organized into six sessions. These sessions include short videos, lesson plans, exercises for teachers to learn the necessary background material, tip sheets, and other resources. Lesson plans are available for students from kindergarten to eighth grade, and lesson topics range from persuasive writing to plant biology to nutrition. The tip sheets cover a variety of logistical aspects, such as how to manage groups of children in a garden setting, best practices and troubleshooting tips for seed propagation, and how to prepare the garden for the winter. School Gardening 101 was created to complement the NYBG's six-day professional development institute for teachers. As the NYBG states, "School gardens are a wonderful way to connect children to plants, gardening, food, nutrition, and the outdoors," and School Gardening 101 helps provide educators new to gardening with the knowledge they'll need to inspire their students. [JDC]

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BitCurator is a toolkit for digital forensics, archiving, and digital curation. It assembles best-of-breed open source tools for data triage, forensic disk imaging, file system analysis, location of PII (private and individually identifying information), and export of metadata. Libraries and archives can use this toolkit to support an ingestion workflow for new digital content. BitCurator also includes tools for rescuing data from failing media and can be used for data recovery. A detailed walk-through of BitCurator's functionality can be located in the quickstart guide under the support menu. Under the "use cases" category, users will find real-world examples of how BitCurator has been used in practice. BitCurator is distributed either as a bootable CD image or as a VirtualBox machine image. It can run with as little as 4G of memory, but for data-intensive tasks, the BitCurator team recommends at least an Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 1700, and at least 16G of memory. [CRH]

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Thonny is an integrated development environment for Python designed specifically for beginning programmers. It presents a simple user interface that was designed to be easy to explore and learn. The built-in debugger features several ways to visualize the execution of code. Particularly useful for beginners is Thonny's "faithful representation of function calls" where each function's context is displayed in a separate window, visually illustrating how recursive functions work. It also includes a step-by-step evaluation mode where the debugger shows how subexpressions are computed one piece at a time. The editor includes familiar features like code completion and highlighting of syntax errors, but also special highlighting of variables to distinguish variables with the same name in different scopes (e.g., inside different functions). Installers are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux computers. Thonny is a free software with code available from Bitbucket under the MIT license. [CRH]

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We originally featured The Ways in the Scout Report on 12-9-2016, and it continues to provide teachers and general audiences alike an engaging educational resource for learning about Native American culture.

From the Wisconsin Media Lab, a state-funded organization known for creating educational resources for public schools, comes The Ways: a resource dedicated to Native culture and language in the Upper Midwest. The project is designed with grades 6-12 in mind, but will also appeal to a much wider audience. In the stories section of this website, visitors can watch short videos that highlight a number of aspects of contemporary Native culture. For instance, "Language Apprentice" highlights the work of the Hoocak Waaziija Haci Language Division, a branch of the Ho-Chunk government devoted to teaching the Ho-Chunk language to Ho-Chunk individuals (and others) of all ages. Another video, "Prayers in a Song," features the work of Minneapolis, Minnesota-based hip-hop artist Tall Paul, who raps in both English as well as Anishinaabemowin. Each video story is accompanied by questions and resources for instructors to use in the classroom. The Ways also features an interactive map that highlights the contemporary geographic distribution of American Indian and/or Alaskan Native individuals in the Great Lakes region (using the 2000 census) alongside a map of Treaty Lands designated to different tribes in 1825, as well as a map of current Tribal lands.

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