The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 15

The internet has become an integral part of contemporary life in many parts of the world, and with this technology has come access to information often in overwhelming amounts and of dubious quality. How can you sort out fact from fiction online and avoid (or correct) bad internet habits? Navigating Digital Information, a new Crash Course video series hosted by John Green offers viewers practical strategies for these and other digital literacy topics. In ten engaging episodes, each approximately fifteen minutes long, this series teaches valuable skills and techniques for evaluating online information in a way that helps viewers become more critically conscious of the digital material they consume. All who use the internet could likely benefit from this course because, as Green notes in the series preview, "Everyone is susceptible to being misled online, and anyone who believes themselves to be somehow immune to misinformation is, in fact, especially susceptible to it." This series will be of value to educators, students, and the general public alike. Launched in March 2019, Navigating Digital Information was produced as part of the MediaWise initiative, a project of the Poynter Institute, in partnership with the Stanford History Education Group with funding from Google. [JDC]

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Readers with an interest in public health, whether scholarly or casual, may want to check out the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP). This research institute "works to prevent illness and death from targeted infectious disease threats through research and the translation of scientific information into real-world, practical applications, policies, and solutions." Visitors to CIDRAP will find up-to-date news on a variety of infectious disease events and research occurring around the world, with currently trending topics highlighted near the top of the page. Those seeking information about specific health issue will want to check out the infectious disease topics section. Here, readers will find an alphabetized list of links, each leading to a collection of CIDRAP's news articles and recent medical literature on that topic often accompanied by additional information such as a disease overview or related practices. Readers may also like to explore CIDRAP's many ongoing programs. As of this write-up, their most prominent program is the Antimicrobial Stewardship Project, which features a range of multimedia content for both clinicians and the general public. Founded in 2001, CIDRAP is based at the University of Minnesota and directed by Dr. Michael T. Osterholm. [JDC]

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Math educators and aficionados may be interested in Celebratio Mathematica, an open-access digital publication that "celebrates mathematics and related fields, and their people." Visitors to this project will find extensive information on the lives and work of nearly thirty noteworthy mathematicians (as of this write-up), with each person's entry organized into an "enhanced guide to [their] collected works." These digital volumes include such figures as David Blackwell, "an eminent statistician who specialized in probability and game theory," and Emmy Noether, a pioneer in abstract algebra and the namesake of several influential concepts. Each volume contains a collection of biographical narratives (sometimes in the mathematician's own words), a bibliography of their published work, commentaries by other mathematicians on the significance of their work, information on their graduate students, and more. For anyone curious about the careers of prominent twentieth-century mathematicians, this project is a valuable resource. Celebratio Mathematica was conceived by Robion C. Kirby and James W. Pitman, both professors of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and published by MSP (Mathematical Sciences Publishers), a nonprofit scholarly publisher. [JDC]

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Founded in 1857, the venerable magazine The Atlantic has borne witness to the numerous changes and events that have occurred throughout modern history. For readers curious about how that history has intersected with their own lives (or a family member's life), the magazine's Life Timeline feature draws upon its archive to provide personal timelines of milestone historical events. After entering a birthdate, readers are presented with ten to thirteen events from throughout their lifespan beginning shortly before they were born, with each event situated in the context of the reader's life. For example, a college student born in 2000 is "one of the first people who's never lived in a world without the euro," while someone born in 1980 is informed that "[their] life can be divided into two halves: before and after Google." Life Timeline incorporates events of world-changing significance, such as the moon landing in 1969, as well as popular culture references; e.g., how teenagers were depicted during the year you turned 13. First launched in 2017, these Life Timelines can also be shared on social media and those interested may enter their email to be notified of future updates to their timeline. [JDC]

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As more colleges and universities embrace online education, whether through blended, flipped, or fully online courses, accessibility needs to be taken into consideration to ensure that all learners, including those with disabilities, are able to access and use course content. This collection of resources offers online instructors and course designers a solid starting point for making sure their course materials are accessible. Here, visitors will find helpful quick start Canvas tutorials on the fundamentals of accessibility in the context of online teaching through guides for several essential file types, including Word documents, PDF files, PowerPoint slides, and Excel spreadsheets. This collection also includes links to recorded webinars and video tutorials for creating accessible documents, as well as to self-paced courses on how to create accessible Canvas courses and on how to assess the accessibility of online digital media. These resources are provided by the Online Education Initiative, a collaborative project of California Community Colleges. [JDC]

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Since its initial launch in late 2009, the independent digital magazine Hyperallergic has grown into an influential arts journalism platform, describing itself as "a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art and culture in the world today." Both arts professionals and those generally curious about art may enjoy this thought-provoking site, where visitors will find thousands of articles ranging from art news, visual and performing arts reviews, photo essays, in-depth features, interviews, and even comics and poetry. This dizzying array of content is accompanied by a well-organized menu and the site is also searchable. Those interested in more leisurely reads may want to check out Hyperallergic's weekend edition, which is comprised of eight weekly "thoughtful pieces about art, literature, film, music, and required reading links from around the web" and is also available as an email newsletter (among several options). Visitors may also like to check out their podcast, which launched in 2016. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Hyperallergic is run by its co-founders Hrag Vartanian, the editor-in-chief and art critic and his husband, publisher Veken Gueyikian. [JDC]

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Italian Renaissance Learning Resources is a free web resource for students and teachers that was created through a collaboration between the U.S. National Gallery of Art and Oxford University Press's Grove Art Online. Italian Renaissance Learning Resources is organized into eight units that each explore a different theme in Italian Renaissance art. Within each unit are essays, primary sources, images of artwork, a glossary, questions for discussion, and activities with suggested academic levels: elementary, intermediate, or advanced. For example, the unit "Picturing Family and Friends" features essays and case studies on husbands and wives, children, lovers, and friends and enemies. The images in this unit include painted portraits as well as coins with representations of powerful people and their associates. The primary sources -- poems and descriptions of weddings -- are transcribed for the website, while the activities are things like designing a wedding cassone (a marriage chest). Other activities listed on the site include looking at the details of a dowry and comparing the Renaissance ideas of friendship with twenty-first-century ideas. [DS]

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Elementary and middle school educators may want to check out this resource featuring classroom activities that integrate Ojibwe art and culture "to enhance interest, understanding, enthusiasm, and performance in standards-based subjects among American Indian and non-American Indian students in grades K-8." Here, visitors will find a large collection of standards-aligned, arts-integrated lesson plans developed by working teachers and organized by grade level, season, and primary content area. One example of a spring lesson that integrates art and science features birchbark birdhouses, which students make in class while learning about paper birch's significance to Native cultures in the Lake Superior region. This robust curriculum also includes tips for teachers, a list of additional resources, and a thorough explanation of its pedagogical philosophy, content standards, and intended learning outcomes. While these lessons are designed to be specific to Ojibwe culture, educators and tribal leaders in other regions may like to use this resource as a model for developing a similar curriculum that would be accurate and appropriate for their local Native cultures. Intersecting Ojibwe Art Curriculum is the result of Project Intersect and the Culture-Based Arts Integration Curriculum, two projects facilitated by the University of Minnesota and funded by the US Department of Education. [JDC]

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Discover Islamic Art is a virtual museum portal facilitated by the nonprofit organization Museum With No Frontiers that invites visitors to explore the art and material culture of Islamic societies throughout the Mediterranean region. This multifaceted site offers several avenues for discovery. Visitors may like to start by checking out the artistic introduction, where they can learn the basics of Islamic art and architecture in accordance with ten different themes such as the Umayyads, the Muslim West, and the Ottomans, then move on to the site's eighteen virtual exhibitions. Readers can also browse the museum's objects and monuments by country, period/dynasty, and date in the permanent collection, or search the database by keyword. The intriguing timeline section allows readers to generate a chronology after choosing among 15 countries in the Mediterranean and Europe along with a range of centuries. Learn with MWNF leads to a set of Flash-based interactive educational activities. In its present incarnation, Discover Islamic Art is the combination of two virtual museum efforts: one by the same name that was created in collaboration with 14 partner countries from 2004-2007, and another entitled Exploring Islamic Art Collections that launched in 2009 and brought together 52 collections in 22 countries. [JDC]

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First displayed in 1988, Harvest of Endurance is a scroll more than 160 feet (50 meters) long "that represents two centuries of Chinese contact with, and emigration to, Australia." This intricate artwork was hand-painted on 18 panels in the traditional gong bi style, which aims "to achieve harmony through balance and an application of the principles of yin and yang." Here, the National Museum of Australia enables visitors to view the entirety of this beautiful scroll online. In the explore the scroll section, visitors can navigate through the scroll's highly detailed sections and read the short accompanying texts explaining the scenes and history it depicts, with links to further information on specific people when relevant. Visitors may also choose to view the scroll without the explanatory text as an interactive virtual exhibit. Readers who are unfamiliar with this type of artwork may also want to read about how to read the scroll for some brief background information. Harvest of Endurance was conceived and researched by Mo Yimei, who at the time was a graduate student at Australian National University, and painted by her brother, Mo Xiangyi, and his wife, Wang Jingwen. [JDC]

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SystemRescueCd is a bootable live environment for administration and recovery of computers after especially messy system crashes. Included in the environment are utilities for repairing damaged partition tables, accessing and debugging errors on common filesystems, recovering data from failing storage devices, creating disk images, performing hardware diagnostics, and more. Some familiarity with basic UNIX concepts and command-line tools will be helpful to make use of the tools on the SystemRescueCd. The manual on the project website includes a number of introductory articles and a quick start guide for users who may be less familiar with these sorts of tools. Also included are step-by-step guides such as "Backup data from an unbootable Windows computer," "Secure deletion of data," and "Repairing a damaged Grub" (Grub is the most common Linux boot loader). As it is a Linux-based live environment, SystemRescueCd can be run on nearly any computer with an Intel or AMD processor. Instructions are provided for creating a bootable CD or a USB stick. [CRH]

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Pup is a command-line utility fox extracting, filtering, and printing parts of HTML documents. It was inspired by the popular jq utility that can perform similar tasks for JSON documents, which was previously covered in the April 27, 2018, Scout Report. Users select parts of pages using CSS selector syntax. Pup includes support for complex syntax like attribute selectors, pseudo classes, and selector chaining. The full list of implemented selectors can be located in the PUP readme. In addition to just outputting the selected HTML, pup can also display the element text, element attributes, or a JSON serialization of the HTML information. The pup readme contains a quick start that demonstrates how to generate a JSON format list of articles currently on the front page of Hacker News. Pup executables can be downloaded from the releases page for a variety of systems including Windows, macOS, Linux, and several BSDs. Pup is free software, distributed under the MIT license, with source code available on GitHub. [CRH]

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Originally featured in the Scout Report on 8-08-2014, this interactive exhibit from the Getty Museum continues to provide an interesting way to learn and think about the creation and movement of different art objects.

When some look at art, they might just see a beautiful vase or a well-done etching of a street scene from nineteenth-century Salamanca. But look closely: every work of art reveals something about the world in which it was made, from ancient Egypt to twenty-first century Detroit. This rather engaging interactive exhibit from the Getty Museum invites visitors to look at four items from this collection for just such a close look. The items here include a silver fountain, a wall light, a side chair, and a lidded bowl. Each item will give visitors the opportunity to learn about a unique period in human history by looking at the various tools and technologies used to create it. Additionally, curious parties can view a collection of links that will encourage further exploration.

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