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The Scout Report
July 10, 2009
Volume 15, Number 27
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2. The Interactive Nolli Map of Rome [pdf]
Born in 1701, Giambattista Nolli was an architect who was enamored of Rome
in a way that few people have ever experienced. He spent thousands of hours
creating his La Pianta Grande di Roma ("the great plan of Rome"), which
became his remarkable 1748 map of the Eternal City. The actual map consists
of twelve engraved copper plates that measure six feet high and seven feet
wide when combined. Nolli was very careful to record the streets, squares,
and various other public spaces throughout the city. This website, created
by a team of dedicated scholars at the University of Oregon, allows users to
examine the map in all its glory, along with a number of interactive layers
that document specific building types and census data. First time visitors
can launch the map engine from the homepage, and after that, they may wish
to look at some of the thematic sections, which include "Natural Features",
"Architecture", and "Cartography". The site also includes some fine articles
on the map and its legacy, including "The Walls of Rome" and "The Nolli Map
as Artifact". [KMG]
5. NASA: Home and City [Flash Player]
This site attempts to answer a question everyone has probably asked
themselves: How does space exploration impact their daily life? NASA has
provided this website dedicated to help answer that query. To start,
visitors can click on the drawing of the house, on the left side of the
screen. Once selected, visitors will hear realistic birds chirping, dogs
barking, and birds coming out of the leafy tree to alight on the lawn. The
two tabs that appear that say "Rotate", on either side of the screen, can be
clicked on to rotate the house, to discover the rooms in which space
exploration has had an impact. Visitors can pick a room, such as the
kitchen, bathroom, or living room, and will find a list of items that have
been invented or improved upon due to space exploration. The kitchen boasts
"Enriched Baby Food", "Water Purification", and "Freeze-Dried Technology".
Visitors can choose one of the items and listen to a brief video about it.
After the video, a tab entitled "Click Here to Learn More" allows the
visitor to read official documents relating to the discovery or enhancement,
from NASA's Scientific and Technical Information website. [KMG]
To find this resource and more high-quality online resources in math and
science visit Scout's sister site - AMSER, the Applied Math and Science
Educational Repository at http://amser.org.
====== In The News ====
18. Trafalgar Square becomes the site of an intriguing public art
installation for the next three months
Trafalgar Square plinth Antony Gormley
plinth/article-1142654-detail/article.html
London Journal: Briefly Ascending to the Spotlight, Britons Take Their Place
Among Giants [Free registration may be required]
Fun, but is it art?
The Fourth Plinth: The Story So Far
other
Plinth highlights in 40 seconds
One & Other
Antony Gormley [Flash Player]
Trafalgar Square in London is arguably one of the most well known public
spaces in a city that has a surfeit of rather fine public spaces. The Square
is surrounded by a host of landmarks, including the National Gallery and the
St Martin-in-the-Fields church. Within the Square, visitors often are
attracted to the four enormous plinths which hold only three statues. The
fourth plinth was intended to be the site for an equestrian statue of
William IV, but the monies for such work never materialized. For the next
three months, that empty fourth plinth will be occupied by a wide range of
Britons as part of a rather intriguing public art experiment. The work was
designed by noted artist Antony Gormley, and essentially it consists of
Britons getting up on the plinth for an hour and doing more or less what
they want. So far, people up on the plinth have drawn attention to various
charities and causes, read sections from the Arabian Nights, passed out
chocolate, and so on. One participant, Dr. Stephen Roser, noted, "It's a
bit like being Prince Charles for an hour-having the position to be heard
without any actual power." [KMG]
The first link will take readers to an article from the Bristol Post which
talks about the various residents from Bristol who have found themselves on
top of the plinth in Trafalgar Square thus far. The second link leads to a
New York Times article from this Tuesday that talks about the installation
in greater detail. The third link will whisk users away to a piece from the
Sunday Times that asks the important question in regards to this new
installation: "Fun, But is it Art?" Moving along, the fourth link leads to a
special section from the Guardian Online about the first couple of days at
the fourth plinth. Those persons seeking a quick overview of the goings on
at the fourth plinth will appreciate the fifth link, which features a short
video clip of the "performances" thus far. The sixth link leads to the
official homepage of the project (titled "One & Other"). Here visitors can
watch the proceedings atop the fourth plinth, and it should be noted that
"this is a live webstream that may contain offensive content." Finally, the
last link leads to the official homepage of the artist Antony Gormley. [KMG]
For information on additional contributors, see the Internet Scout staff
page.
Below are the copyright statements to be included when reproducing
annotations from The Scout Report.
The single phrase below is the copyright notice to be used when
reproducing any portion of this report, in any format.
>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2009.
The paragraph below is the copyright notice to be used when reproducing
the entire report, in any format:
Copyright Internet Scout, 1994-2009. Internet Scout
located in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, provides information about the Internet to the U.S.
research and education community under a grant from the National Science
Foundation, number NCR-9712163. The Government has certain rights in
this material. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim
copies of the entire Scout Report provided this paragraph, including the
copyright notice, are preserved on all copies.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, or the National Science
Foundation.
=======
The Scout Report
June 26, 2009
Volume 15, Number 25
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A publication of Internet Scout.
Sponsored by University of Wisconsin - Madison Libraries.
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4. Manuscripts and Letters of Oscar Wilde
The Morgan Library in New York City presents a digital version of a slim (50
handwritten pages) bound volume of manuscripts and letters by Oscar Wilde.
The volume has an interesting provenance, since it came to the Library
through the family of Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's lover. Wilde sued
Douglas' father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, for
libel, but the trial served to make public salacious details of Wilde's
private life, which eventually led to his conviction and imprisonment on
charges of indecency. Ironically, the volume's cover is stamped with the
Marquess of Queensberry crest, since the letters and manuscripts within were
collected by the eleventh Marquess of Queensberry, grandson of John Sholto
Douglas. A letter documenting the start of Wilde and Alfred Douglas
relationship, written around November 1892, is in the book, as well as
manuscript versions of "The Doer of Good," "The Disciple," "The Master,"
"The House of Judgment," and "The Artist." The "read this page" feature of
the web site translates the handwritten pages into easier-to-read
typescript. [DS]
5. Southwest Journal of Cultures
Sponsored by Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, the Southwest
Journal of Cultures is an online scholarly book review venue that is
intended to bring academics and others book reviews from the field of
culture studies. The Journal was first published in September 2008, and its
editors have managed to cover a broad range of topics in a short time.
Visitors can scroll through the most recent reviews, some of which include
critical appraisals of works like "Chinese Street Opera in Singapore" and
"Spare Time in Texas: Recreation and History in the Lone Star State".
Visitors are welcome to leave their own comments on each review, and they
can also look through the online archive. Those interested in starting
their own like-minded project would do well to spend sometime navigating
this well-thought out site. [KMG]
7. Encyclopedia of Life
A webpage for every organism on earth is the goal of this site, which was
initially funded in 2007 by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan
Foundation. To "learn how to navigate EOL, search for content, customize
your experience, and explore pages..." visitors can start with the tab
"Using the Site" at the top of the page. Here, there is a video tour on
general "Navigation" of the site and instructions on how specifically to use
the "Species Pages". Users can check out the FAQs section under the same
tab for more help. Visitors can select the "Language" tab at the top of the
page to view the site in English, Spanish, Russian, Ukranian, German, or
French. In the "About EOL" tab on the far upper right hand side of the page,
visitors can check out the "Content Partners" link about halfway down the
menu. There are over two dozen partners and links to their websites listed,
including the Nearctic Spider Database, Mushroom Observer, FishBase, and
AntWeb. [KMG]
To find this resource and more high-quality online resources in math and
science visit Scout's sister site - AMSER, the Applied Math and Science
Educational Repository at http://amser.org.
10. Waste Online
Sure enough, there is a good deal of "waste" online, so it's nice to learn
about the Waste Online website which serves as a great repository for
information about an entirely different set of waste-related matters. This
British-based website has been funded by the New Opportunities Fund Digitise
project. The project is overseen by Waste Watch, which is "the leading
environmental charity dedicated to the reduction, reuse and recycling of
household waste." First-time visitors can get started by clicking on "Wacky
waste facts", which contains some basic facts about the nature of waste in
the United Kingdom. In the same vicinity, visitors can dig deeper by looking
into sections titled "The problem with waste", "Waste in the workplace", and
"Waste at home". Moving on, the "Search our library" area allows guests to
the site to look for specific items of interest related to dozens of topics,
such as household recycling, office recycling, and metal recycling. Moving
along, the "Information Sheets" area features almost two dozen fact sheets
that can be used as guides to composting, battery recycling, and the history
of waste. [KMG]
To find this resource and more high-quality online resources in math and
science visit Scout's sister site - AMSER, the Applied Math and Science
Educational Repository at http://amser.org.
11. The State Hermitage Museum
The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia is not only an
impressive museum to visit in person, but its online museum is very well
done, and includes virtual tours of several parts of the museum. There is
so much information on this website and after browsing around, visitors will
feel like they have had a personally guided tour of the art collections and
the architecture of the buildings. Visitors can learn the history of the
Hermitage by clicking on "Hermitage History" near the top of the homepage.
The "Timeline" will orient the visitor, and "A Walk Through the Imperial
Hermitage" and "The Winter Palace Through the Ages" allows for a look at
several different ages of parts of the six building museum. The Digital
Collection can be searched or browsed in the usual way, such as by title,
artist, year, medium, etc., but IBM's experimental Query By Image Content
(QBIC) allows visitors to find "a Gauguin masterpiece simply by recalling
the organisation of his subjects or locating a Da Vinci painting by
searching for its predominant colours." There are short animated
demonstrations to show the visitor how to do a search by color or layout.
[KMG]
15. Balzac's Paris: A Guided Tour
Honoré de Balzac was a great lover of Paris, and he happened to live in the
City of Lights during a time when the city was undergoing intense physical
transformation. Admittedly, many of the city's most famous landmarks did not
emerge until after Balzac's passing in 1850, but this rather emotional and
provocative online exhibit takes users into the Paris that the writer knew
most intimately. Drawing on its tremendous Vernon Duke Collection (which
includes over 800 books, maps, and documents on the history of Paris), the
University of California, Riverside Library has created this fine
introduction and exploration of Paris during the life of Balzac. The site
contains a number of virtual tours (illuminated by various primary
documents), along with a biography of Balzac, and a detailed bibliography.
[KMG]
Below are the copyright statements to be included when reproducing
annotations from The Scout Report.
The single phrase below is the copyright notice to be used when
reproducing any portion of this report, in any format.
>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2009.
The paragraph below is the copyright notice to be used when reproducing
the entire report, in any format:
Copyright Internet Scout, 1994-2009. Internet Scout
located in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, provides information about the Internet to the U.S.
research and education community under a grant from the National Science
Foundation, number NCR-9712163. The Government has certain rights in
this material. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim
copies of the entire Scout Report provided this paragraph, including the
copyright notice, are preserved on all copies.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, or the National Science
Foundation.
==
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