From Internet Scout 5/11/18, four items that seemed interesting.
There are more and more digital collections of various kinds around the world. We are just beginning to have a digitized, computer and mobile phone accessible world.
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Open Content on JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/open/?cid=soc_tw_JSTOR
For instructors, researchers, and others looking for open-access material, JSTOR hosts this Open Content page, which provides access to nearly 3,000 books from a variety of academic publishers. This page also includes 29 open-access journals, as well as a helpful collection of journal articles that were published before 1923 and are in the public domain. Visitors can conduct a search for the title of a book or explore this collection alphabetically. Books can be downloaded in PDF format by chapter, allowing researchers to read this material with ease. Visitors can search this collection by selecting the advanced search option. Here, visitors may have the option of limiting their search results to open-access materials via the "select an access type" box. [MMB]
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One-Minute Art History:
https://aeon.co/videos/a-jaunt-through-five-millennia-of-art-history-in-just-one-minute
From film director Cao Shu comes <i>One-Minute Art History</i>, a mesmerizing short film that engages viewers with hundreds of artwork in less than a minute. As viewers watch the video, they are presented with a number of successive artworks that, collectively, create an animation of an individual sitting down, taking a sip of a drink, lighting a cigarette, checking a wristwatch, and standing up. Spectacularly, this animation is comprised of hundreds of famous paintings and drawings. At the beginning of this video, viewers are presented with art dating back to ancient Egypt. As the video progresses, visitors are invited to travel through time, viewing paintings from a number of different art movements spanning thousands of years. Shu created <i>One-Minute Art History</i> in 2015. The online magazine <i>Aeon</i> recently featured this work in its video series. [MMB
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National Geographic: Seven Things to Know About Climate Change:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/climate-change
National Geographic recently created this series of infographics and animations designed to help viewers understand and visualize the causes and effects of global climate change. Collectively, these visualizations recently garnered a 2018 Webby award for Best Data Visualization. In the first of these animations, visitors can view how the average annual temperature has changed between the years 1905 through 2016. In this visualization, each year is represented by a dot. Each dot is color-coded to represent how the average temperature of that year compares with the average temperature of the whole twentieth century: years that were colder than this century-long average are colored blue, while warmer years are colored red. In addition, dots are shaded to reveal how much warmer (or colder) each year has been as compared to the twentieth-century mean temperature. As this visualization reveals, every single year after 1976 has exhibited above-average temperatures. Other visualizations in this series are designed to help viewers visualize the impact of global warming on natural disasters and species extinction. [MMB]
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(Books by Ben Wattenberg, Hans Rosling and his son and daughter, Yuval Harari and Stephen Pinker plus Hans Rosling's TED talks and this site linked below all try to show that despite what is happening in your life and area, and despite what you see and hear from the news and tv, the world is doing better in many ways.)
Our World in Data:
<i>Originally featured in July 2017, Max Roser continues to regularly update Our World in Data, thereby helping readers access and interpret data about our global community.</i>
How do you measure global human well-being over time and across nations? Our World in Data is a website dedicated to providing comprehensive, nuanced insights into this complex question. Authored by Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford, this resource provides a series of choropleth maps and graphs related to human well-being, including education, violence and rights, income distribution, and health. Yet Roser's website is more than a series of visually appealing graphs; for each topic, Roser includes a link to the original data source (making his site, in his words, a sort of "database of databases") and analysis of the relative validity of each data set. Roser believes that "the empirical view of the world shows how the Enlightenment continues to make our world a better place." Visitors to the website are encouraged to ask their own questions and reach their own conclusions. Finally, the site includes Our Data Grapher, a free tool that allows anyone to upload their own data to make charts.