The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 22

At the Scout Report we love a good interactive map, and the Opportunity Atlas is a fabulous exemplar. This richly detailed map created by researchers at the US Census Bureau and Harvard University visualizes for general audiences and scholars alike the connections between the economic status of adults and the neighborhoods where they grew up. We were impressed by the design and usability of the Opportunity Atlas as well as its robustness.

Launched in October 2018, the Opportunity Atlas answers the question "Which neighborhoods in America offer children the best chance to rise out of poverty?" by using "anonymous data following 20 million Americans from childhood to their mid-30s." The result is a fascinating map showing the average adulthood outcomes of people born between 1978-1983, according to the census tract where they grew up. Visitors can explore the map by zooming into a particular place and selecting the outcome (e.g. household income) and demographics (e.g. parent income) they are interested in. They can also view several interactive stories (identified on the map by a book icon) that provide a tour through some of the insights the Opportunity Atlas offers. The Opportunity Atlas has several features that may be of interest to researchers and educators, including the ability to download raw data, save or link to specific map views, compare two different demographics, and import and overlay your own data. This resource provides tutorials, user guides, and detailed explanations of their methodology. The Opportunity Atlas is a collaboration between researchers at the US Census Bureau and Opportunity Insights (formerly the Equality of Opportunity Project), a research and policy group at Harvard University.

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Plants of the World Online impressed us because its vast, easily searchable database, its design, and the rich detail of its information make this resource valuable for plant researchers while remaining interesting to casual visitors. For example, visitors can search by colors or other descriptive words, rather than being limited to scientific or common names. Since we first featured this resource in January 2019, it has added more than 20,000 detailed descriptions.

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.

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Some of our favorite resources are those that introduce us to different ways of looking at something familiar. Native Land, an interactive map showing the historical locations of Indigenous territories in the Americas and Australasia, is a wonderful exemplar of this. Engagingly designed, this resource invites visitors to explore the many-layered histories of the area where they live. We also appreciate that Native Land encourages users to think critically about this map and its potential relationship to colonialist perspectives.

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.

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The Scout staff loved this Black History Month edition of the Overlooked project from The New York Times, which we featured in February 2019. This compelling project presents belated obituaries of notable black men and women whose deaths were initially and undeservedly ignored by the Times. By correcting these oversights, the Times offers readers a series of important and eminently readable stories on the lives of these remarkable individuals.

Over the past year, The New York Times has been publishing obituaries for women of historical importance whose deaths the newspaper had neglected to commemorate. This project, entitled Overlooked (featured in the 3-16-2018 Scout Report), recently added a special edition in honor of Black History Month. This collection, published on January 31, 2019, "highlights a prominent group of black men and women whose lives we did not examine at the time of their deaths." In one obituary, Tanisha C. Ford writes about fashion designer Zelda Wynn Valdes, who began her career in the Jim Crow era and, after opening her own boutique in New York City, dressed socialites and stars such as Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, and Marlene Dietrich. In another obituary, Wil Haygood writes about celebrated ragtime pianist Scott Joplin, whose iconic piece "The Entertainer" is instantly recognizable today and who was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his music in 1976, nearly six decades after his death. Other remarkable people featured in this special edition include filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant, and inventor Granville T. Woods. Readers are also invited to nominate candidates for future Overlooked obituaries.

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Over the past year we have featured a number of resources that focus on accessibility because content should be usable by all who are interested, particularly in educational settings. One of our favorite information hubs is the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials. This organization stands out for its breadth, offering numerous resources aimed at helping learners of all educational levels, as well as information for those interested in policies and guidelines supporting accessibility.

The National Center on Accessible Educational Materials (AEM Center) is a nonprofit initiative that "provide[s] resources and technical assistance for educators, parents, students, publishers, conversion houses, accessible media producers, and others interested in learning more about AEM." Here, readers will find a wealth of well-organized information and resources for accessible education. Those new to AEM should start with the About AEM section, which contains introductory materials such as quick start guides organized by audience. Parents and educators should check out the Supporting Learners section, where they will find information organized by age group, beginning with early learning and ranging through workforce development resources for adults, as well as a directory of AEM contacts for each state. Additionally, the Navigating AEM section provides helpful overviews of the many AEM options available. Those interested can also subscribe to the AEM Connector, a quarterly email newsletter "highlighting the best and brightest resources, products, and services from the AEM Center and from our partners and colleagues in the field." The AEM Center is led by the Center for Applied Special Technology, an independent, nonprofit education research and development organization in Massachusetts that focuses on Universal Design for Learning.

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We love the internet and digital media, but they can also make life complicated in myriad ways. Readers really responded to this video series from Crash Course, which aims to help viewers learn to avoid some of the pitfalls of the internet and gain practical skills in evaluating the information they encounter online. This series exemplifies the energy and informativeness with which the Crash Course team infuses all of their videos.

The internet has become an integral part of contemporary life in many parts of the world. With this technology has come access to information, often in overwhelming quantities 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.

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Many of our most popular resources in the last year were designed to help booklovers find new titles and authors of interest. Of those, NPR's Book Concierge stood out as the clear favorite among Scout readers and staff alike. In addition to being impressed by this site's impeccable design, we loved the breadth of genres on offer and the freedom to mix and match categories to find new favorites, as well as the ready access to previous years' recommendations.

Wondering what book to read next or gift someone with? NPR's Book Concierge may be able to offer some inspiration. Now in its sixth year, this interactive guide offers readers a curated, highly visual selection of more than 300 books published in 2018 and "recommended by NPR hosts, critics, reporters, and producers." Designed by NPR Visuals to "be more Venn diagram-y than list-y," the Book Concierge allows visitors to filter the recommendations by multiple categories simultaneously. For example, selecting the two categories Biography & Memoir and Seriously Good Writing brings up such results as Split Tooth by Inuit musician Tanya Tagaq and In Pieces by award-winning actress Sally Field. By default, the Book Concierge displays its results as tiled book covers, but readers who prefer a simple list view may choose that option. Clicking a specific book leads to a brief, spoiler-free description from its recommender, as well as links to its reviews or coverage by NPR or member stations when applicable. Those interested in seeing NPR's book picks from previous years will find links to ten years' worth of recommendations in the left sidebar.

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Virtually all of us can appreciate a helpful memory boost now and then, and the downloadable font Sans Forgetica offers an innovative tool to do just that. Readers were just as fascinated by this inventive idea as Scout staff, making Sans Forgetica one of the most popular tech tools of the past year. In addition to its clever name, we also love that Sans Forgetica has a Chrome extension so that those who read more than they type can also take advantage of the memory-boosting font.

Students and learners who use typewritten notes may want to check out Sans Forgetica, a free "downloadable font that is scientifically designed to help you remember your study notes." Released in October 2018, Sans Forgetica was developed using a theory of cognitive psychology known as "desirable difficulty" to be just a little more difficult to read, the idea being that this "prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing." This font was created by an interdisciplinary team of psychology and design researchers (including the famous typographer Stephen Banham) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Here, visitors can see a demonstration of the font and watch three short videos explaining the science behind it and how it was made. Sans Forgetica can be downloaded as an OpenType font file for both Mac and PC computers, and a Chrome extension to convert in-browser text to Sans Forgetica is also available.

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January 1, 2019 marked the first time in more than twenty years that any works had entered the US public domain due to copyright expiration. As part of our spotlight on new public domain content, we featured this collection of films from the silent era made available by the Internet Archive. In addition to streaming online, many of these classic films can also be downloaded.

Readers wondering where they might find some of the films that recently entered the public domain under US copyright law should take a look at the Internet Archive's movie collection. At the link above, visitors can watch and download several dozen full-length feature films from 1923, the publication year that most recently became public domain in the US. This collection includes such films as Cecil B. DeMille's lesser-known silent version of The Ten Commandments, the classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney and directed by Wallace Worsley, and Alla Nazimova's avant-garde adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play Salome, as well as several of Otto Messmer's early Felix the Cat cartoons. Although films from this time had no audible dialogue, some in this collection include music. Visitors may use the search bar and filters on the left to further explore the Internet Archive's movie collections, and the entire site is bursting with other content to explore as well.

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Fans of the Scout Report will be unsurprised to learn that this resource from the Digital Public Library of America, which we featured in June 2018, proved a crowd favorite. Open Bookshelf makes it possible for readers of all stripes to download public domain e-books on their mobile devices with no need for a library card or account login, including books in languages other than English.

On June 21, 2018, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) introduced Open Bookshelf, a one-stop shop for hundreds of e-books that are freely available online. This collection, which currently features over 1,000 books, includes titles that are in the public domain along with titles that are Creative Commons licensed. These titles are selected by the Curation Corps, a team of librarians from across the country that includes public, school, and academic librarians. The books available on Open Bookshelf reflect the diversity of the Curation Corps: the collection features classical literature (including Pride and Prejudice and Little Women), textbooks, academic titles, and children's books. Visitors may browse this collection by language or genre (e.g. science fiction, education & study aids, and computers). Individual users can access Open Bookshelf through SimplyE, a free mobile application. Open Bookshelf is also available to participating libraries through the DPLA Exchange.

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