The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 43

Readers who appreciate the more macabre aspects of history may enjoy the London Medieval Murder Map. Here, visitors will find an interactive map of the medieval city of London with pins marking the locations of 142 homicides that were committed between 1300-1340 and recorded on the city's Coroners' Rolls. Clicking a pin brings up a short narrative of that location's murder, the details of which were gathered by an investigative jury shortly after it occurred. For example, one incident in the Cheapside area involved an eel-seller who died after being beaten for discarding eel skins outside a shop. Visitors can filter the map's contents by fields such as year, murder weapon, and victim's gender, and they can choose between two different historical maps. Links below the map (and in the menu to its left) lead to pages explaining how it was created, how 14th-century London operated, and what this data tells us about London's violence during this period. Additionally, a video of a lecture presented at the project's launch is available via a link above the map. Launched in November 2018, this resource is a project of the Violence Research Centre (VRC) at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Criminology and was led by Manuel Eisner, a Professor of Comparative Criminology and Director of the VRC. [JDC]

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Chemistry educators and anyone curious to learn about gold may want to check out this article written by Grant Currin for the October 2019 issue of ChemMatters (see the 8-21-2015 Scout Report), an educational magazine published by the American Chemical Society. This informative and approachable article tells the story of how gold came into existence, an origin story that researchers have only recently begun to understand. In addition to the article, readers should take a look at the sidebar, where they will find a word puzzle about gold's diverse uses, an explanation of 24-karat gold and other gold alloys, a link to a related article exploring the idea of space mining, and more. High school chemistry teachers interested in assigning this article to their classes may appreciate its accompanying 11-page downloadable teacher's guide, which includes a pre-reading quiz, reading comprehension questions, the solution to the word puzzle, and suggestions for teaching strategies, among other tools. The article can be viewed online in full and also downloaded as a PDF that includes some of the sidebar content, and a Spanish translation is also available to download. [JDC]

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Scholars, students, and educators of Dante's Divine Comedy, as well as aficionados of the medieval poet's masterpiece, may find Dante Lab to be of interest. First launched in 2013, Dante Lab is a project of Dartmouth College that grew out of its predecessor, the Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP). The DDP "edited and digitized the entire texts of more than 75 commentaries to the Divine Comedy," written between the 14th century and the 21st century. As a follow-up to the DDP, Dante Lab offers an innovative web application that enables its visitors "to read and compare up to four texts from the site's database simultaneously." In addition to the previously digitized commentaries, Dante Lab's database includes the full texts of Giorgio Petrocchi's critical edition in Italian (upon which all modern translations are based), Longfellow's 1867 English translation, Streckfuss's 1854 German translation, and Cioranescu's 1964 French translation. New users should begin by visiting the Help section, where they will find tutorials on using, customizing, and citing the Reader. This section also offers several suggestions of Teaching Scenarios for students and scholars at various levels which may be helpful to educators interested in using Dante Lab with their students. [JDC]

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On October 25, 1415, the ill and exhausted English army (led by King Henry V, who had inherited the throne just two years earlier) was badly outnumbered by the French army, which was in much better condition. Given these disparities, an English defeat may have seemed inevitable - but in a remarkable turn of events, the English were victorious, and the Battle of Agincourt turned Henry V into a hero of the Hundred Years' War. Readers curious to learn more about this important battle may enjoy The Road to Agincourt, created on Esri's story maps platform. After setting the stage with background information about the events leading up to the conflicts of 1415, the story map takes readers on a narrative journey (illustrated by numerous maps, images, and graphics) that follows Henry V's invasion of France as well as France's resistance in the weeks preceding Agincourt before diving into the battle itself. Along the way, readers are treated to informative commentary full of details about the two armies' weaponry, strategies, and more. Published in 2018, this richly visual story map was crafted by Ioannis-Rafail Chatzis, a master's student at the University of Edinburgh. As of this write-up, this resource is best viewed in Firefox and may occasionally need a moment to load completely. [JDC]

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Founded in 2009 by food journalist Janice Revell and her mother, Regina (Jeanie) Revell, a retired food safety expert, the mission of StillTasty is "to help consumers save money, eat better and help the environment." To create its content, StillTasty draws on food safety research conducted by government agencies, including the United States Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. StillTasty also contacts food and beverage manufacturers directly to obtain specific information about their products. The main Keep It or Toss It? section of the StillTasty website can be searched by food name, and also browsed by categories such as Nuts, Grains & Pasta, and Vegetables. For example, under Grains & Pasta a user can quickly determine that the shelf life of dry farfalle pasta is about three years, even if the package has been opened. StillTasty also points out the difference between safety and good quality (i.e. frozen farfalle will taste best if it's frozen in a sauce and eaten within 1-2 months, but will still be safe to eat for much longer than that). Users with a particular query in mind may want to begin in the Your Questions Answered section, which covers food safety FAQs. The site also features Shelf Talk, a section dedicated to helping readers with other food preparation and transportation questions. [DS]

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Readers with an interest in digital art should check out this colorful and dynamic website dedicated to the "celebration of African culture of art, design and technology." The site features work from more than 300 distinct Artists (as of this write-up). Each artist's feature includes images of their work, biographical information, or selected quotations from the artist, and links to their social media profiles, so that visitors can follow artists whose work grabs their attention. The Featured Projects tab, which allows users to filter by artistic medium (e.g. film or print design), is another great starting point for those looking to peruse the site's offerings. Those interested in viewing artworks by Country can also do so. To learn more about the artists themselves and their innovative processes, visit the Interviews section to find profiles with creators like French graphic designer Aurelia Durand. These interviews all feature examples of the artist's work, and some are presented in video form. African Digital Art is directed by its founder, Kenyan digital artist Jepchumba, who Forbes included in their 2012 list of 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa. [EL]

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Conducted by the American Folklife Center in 1977, the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project survey sought to "assess and document the status of ethnic art traditions in more than twenty ethnic communities in Chicago." Out of this survey grew a collection hosted by the Library of Congress containing over 1,000 visual artworks (photographs, prints, and drawings), manuscripts, film and video works, and audio recordings, as well as mixed material items. Visitors can begin by reading a short About this Collection section, then go on to browse Collection Items. The collection can be filtered by original format, online format (e.g. image or audio), location, subject matter, and more. Collection items originate primarily from Chicago, but there are also items from surrounding areas, such as Berwyn, Illinois. Most of the items are available in English, with a substantial number of Lithuanian, Spanish, and Korean audio recordings of interviews with survey participants also available. [EL]

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The Prado, Spain's premier art museum, has a browsable and searchable website interface of its rich collection. Readers may wish to begin by reading the short essay by museum director Miguel Falomir. This essay explains that since the Prado's collection was initially amassed by Spain's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monarchs it is therefore based on their tastes in art, which has resulted in gaps in the collection and some time periods that are less well represented than others. That caveat aside, the website is extremely easy to use, beginning with a digital gallery of Masterpieces such as Fra Angelico's fifteenth-century altarpiece The Annunciation, and includes other famous artists such as Rembrandt, Goya, Durer, and Raphael. There is also an alphabetical listing of artists and a set of themes (e.g. saints, royal portrait, or social realism/everyday life) that can be browsed. If the browsing features do not reveal a work of interest, readers can also use a comprehensive search feature that can retrieve results based on artist, title, technique, and support, and more. [DS]

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Pre-K-12 teachers of a variety of subjects may be interested in this collection of lesson plans provided by the Denver Art Museum. Here, visitors will find approximately 350 lesson plans (as of this write-up), offering instructors myriad opportunities to incorporate the visual arts into their classrooms. For example, in the lesson plan "A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words," which takes place over two 50-minute sessions, students in grades 6-12 listen to an excerpt from Petrarch's poem "The Triumphs," sketch their own interpretations of what the poem describes, then compare their sketches to The Triumphs, a group of fifteenth-century Italian paintings that were inspired by Petrarch's poem, and analyze the paintings in pairs. Visitors can filter the lesson plans by intended age group, time period of featured artworks, twenty-first century skills (such as information literacy or critical thinking), and Colorado academic standards (such as language arts or social studies). The Denver Art Museum's lesson plans were funded by a grant from the Morgridge Family Foundation, with additional funding from the William Randolph Hearst Endowment for Education Programs and Xcel Energy Foundation. [JDC]

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Based in Northern Ireland, CIRCA Art Magazine is a digital publication dedicated to "the theory and practice of contemporary art in Ireland." Here, interested readers will find numerous reviews, in-depth essays, interviews, and more, the majority of which focus on contemporary visual arts throughout Ireland. In addition to CIRCA's many Articles, visitors may like to explore the Projects, which currently has two sections. The first, This Matters Now, features short commentaries (with accompanying images) from contributors in the art community on "what intrigues, moves or disturbs," them about a recent art exhibition, while the second, The Degree Shows: Writers' Choice, is an annual feature in which writers are invited "to respond to the work of a chosen graduate from BA and MFA Degree Shows taking place in May-June on the island of Ireland." Readers interested in viewing content from CIRCA's earlier iterations should visit its Archives, available via a link at the top of the website. CIRCA originally began in 1981 as a print publication, then shifted to online-only in 2009. After a few years' hiatus, the magazine relaunched in 2016 and redesigned its website in 2019. [JDC]

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Taskwarrior is a powerful command line to-do list manager. It is designed to be unobtrusive and fast, allowing users to quickly record information about their work and then move on. Users assign tasks to their to-do list with "task add 'Task Description.'" Tasks can optionally have due dates, priorities, dependencies on other tasks, be tagged with free-form data, be part of specific projects, or may recur. Users may employ as many or as few of these features in their workflow as they desire. Taskwarrior seeks to be a methodology neutral tool that users can fit to their own specific preferences. The list of upcoming tasks can be viewed with "task list," and specific tasks can be marked done with "task done." For users that desire it, Taskwarrior can also produce calendars, burndown charts, and a variety of other reports. The Start Here button on the Taskwarrior homepage leads to a quick start guide and links to further documentation. In the Download section, users can locate instructions for installing Taskwarrior on Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows systems. [CRH]

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Fish is the "Friendly Interactive Shell," a command interpreter that seeks to be more user-friendly and intuitive than previous shells (e.g., C shell, tcsh, Bash, Z shell, etc). The Design section located in the Documentation portion of the Fish website goes into substantial detail about the rational guiding Fish development. In short, Fish seeks to provide a simple syntax that is consistent, easy to read, and easy to discover. This discoverability is aided by interactive auto-completion that will suggest commands and options for a user, providing brief descriptions of each option where possible. Fish obtains these brief descriptions by parsing the manual pages installed on a system, not from any built-in database. Fish also seeks to minimize the amount of configuration users must do to have a pleasant environment. Most features are enabled by default and configuration options are kept to a minimum. The Tutorial section of the Fish site gives a brief introduction to the syntax and walks users through a demonstration of Fish's major features. The Documentation section of the site provides detailed reference material. Under the Go Fish section on the Fish homepage, users will find installation instructions for Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD systems. [CRH]

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Originally featured in the 12-07-2018 Scout Report, this project offers visitors the opportunity to get an up-close view of this innovative Renaissance painter's work.

The sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder is known for his intricate paintings, many depicting everyday peasant activities, some in a style inspired by that of Hieronymus Bosch. Bruegel's paintings continue to intrigue art historians and aficionados to this day, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has recently provided a new resource for anyone interested in this Old Master. Launched in October 2018, Inside Bruegel is a digital portal through which visitors can examine in extreme detail twelve of Bruegel's paintings that conservators have painstakingly captured using multiple imaging methods. In addition to the visible light macrophotography showing the paintings as they are seen today, readers can also view them using infrared macrophotography and reflectography, as well as X-radiography. These additional methods allow viewers to look beyond the final images of the paintings and see elements such as the "underdrawings" Bruegel sketched before painting, which sometimes show startling details. For example, in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, X-radiography revealed a corpse in a cart that had at some point been painted over. Available in both English and German, Inside Bruegel was created to accompany a rare exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum featuring all of Bruegel's extant works together.

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