Another distraction: The Grand Canal

Well I just found an unpublished post, and maybe that's just as well, but I'll publish it anyway.
Re-reading it and reflecting upon it, I see that it captures two features of internet research:
1. How easy (and how much fun) it is to stray from the subject at hand.
2. How contradictory and unverifiable the information can be.

and here's the unpublished post. . .

Bamber Gascoigne's short entry on the Grand Canal in China on his site
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa19>TEXT
whetted my curiosity, so I Googled Grand Canal China. Here are a few of the sites I visited.
http://www.chinatown-online.com/cultureeye/highlights/grand.htm
had some salacious stuff about the Emperor who did the heavy lifting (and brutalizing) of connecting smaller canals into the Grand Canal in the 7th century.
The Wikipedia site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_%28China%29#English
wasn't that helpful, due to the lack of good maps, or that interesting, due to the writing.
http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/879134
was a better read, and led me to a few photography sites with Grand Canal shots. In some places houses back up to the canal walls, Venice-like, and stone steps lead down to water level, also like Venice. Gorgeous.
But at this point, let's face it, I don't need to know the exact route of The Grand Canal. Nor do I need to sort out the snarl of conflicting information that I found. I know what I need to know about The Grand Canal in order to get on with the Erie Canal.
Time to shut down this distraction and get focused again.

Distraction

Oh that Canal-du-Midi looks so beautiful!
http://travel.webshots.com/photo/2580775310010267992VlrGaJ
http://images.french-property.com/8/7/9/cms879_o.jpg

Treasure!

I got access to jstor and spent a lot of time pursuing a man named Canvass (or Canvas) White, specifically his trip England to study canals. He came back with drawings, technical innovations, all kinds of information that was crucial to building the Erie Canal. Apparently he's better known for inventing waterproof concrete, so I had to skim through many, many articles from places like Journal of Concrete Engineering before I found anything biographical about him. Unfortunately the England trip wasn't mentioned.

So I took my own trip to England, Googled the Bridgewater Canal figuring from what I've read that that's one that Canvass wouldn't have wanted to miss. Many websites later I found myself at the Canal du Midi, a 240 km water route through France built in 1681 that links the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, eliminating the then month-long trip around Spain.

Websites make conflicting claims about both these canals as being the first of, best of, biggest of, etc. and I found myself once again yearning for CONTEXT. I need a sense of where the information fits into a bigger picture of history if I'm ever to sort out the conflicting claims. Like the CONTEXT I found reading Ronald E. Shaw.

Whimsically I Googled history of canals and landed on two pages of remarkably thoughtful and clear history of canals dating back to the 5th century BCE. Only half a dozen or so canals were discussed, but each was purposefully, even brilliantly chosen, and the author wove their stories together beautifully. But I was still suspicious. Who was this author? Could I trust him or her? How could I check her/him out since there was no byline on the article? I found a button for "how to cite the site," and it turns out that Bamber Gascoigne is responsible for all the content of the site, historyworld.net. Gascoigne wrote a book called The Mughals which I referred to often when I was writing about the Taj Mahal, and which is one of the most thorough, readable, and fascinating histories I've ever read. I poked around a bit on historyworld.net, feeling like a Mughal emperor sifting jewels through his fingers, and what I found was every bit as intelligent as the canal history.

Google Scholar

Someone suggested getting off the Google treadmill and on to the Google Scholar speedway. It wasn't much of a speedway, but at least it was a different treadmill. I spent a goodly amount of time dithering about Jstor and how to get access to it through the New York Public Library. I did a search for Jesse Hawley, which led me to Google Books and a book called Erie Waters West by Ronald E. Shaw. It says the book is only in Preview form, but all 18 references to Jesse Hawley came up, and the couple of chapters I read were all there and intact. So nice to be reading such rich prose: fascinating quotes from Jesse Hawley and Thomas Jefferson, landscape descriptions, historical details, and above all CONTEXT. Historic context, scientific context, economic context, political context, and all in just a few chapters. Later to that, though. There's a whole internet wilderness out there just waiting to be tracked.

Still Googling. . .

The Google and Yahoo and Wikipedia searches for Erie Canal stopped yielding new stuff rather quickly. I keep being referred to the same sites, getting the same information.
I went a few pages deeper into the Jesse Hawley Google search, and found a three-line bio on a website put up by three 10-year-olds at P.S. 97.
They did it through an organization called ThinkQuestNYC which integrates technology into classroom work. Or used to. ThinkQuest was funded by the banking industry. In 2009 the blog on their website went silent after a desperate plea for alternate funding sources. Sad, that.
All other links were repeats of the ones I've already visited.
I searched for some of the more prominent "engineers" ("engineers" in quotes because there were no engineers then: land surveyors yes, engineers, no) who worked on the canal—Canvass White, Judge Benjamin Wright, others— but always came back to the same sites.
Except for a link to marblehistory.com. A short piece there called Wright the "Father of American Engineering."
Decided to look into the history of surveying since that's how all these guys got their start. I found the Surveyors Historical Society, their magazine "Backsights" various state and national surveying organizations, real and virtual surveying museums, surveyors who dress up in period costume in their free time and, I guess, survey stuff.
There goes another perfectly good afternoon!

I read the Wikipedia entry on the canal. There was new (to me) information about construction innovations that seemed like they would be interesting if better explained and more detail about the workers. The stonemasons were German, apparently, and the laborers Irish. They settled down, creating towns along the canal route. The map looked like it would be really interesting if it weren't the size of a postage stamp.
Each section of the Wiki site had a box saying,"this section does not cite any references or sources" which may not mean anything but awakened my suspicions about the accuracy.
The outside links at the end of the piece led me into the world of Erie Canal afficionados-who knew? They tromp around in the wilderness looking for traces of the original canal and post pictures of what they find, or think they've found. I even joined a Yahoo group Erie_Canal. I think I'm supposed to be alerted whenever someone in the group says something, but so far nothing.
Yesterday I told a couple of hundred fourth and third graders that I was working on a book about the Erie Canal. To my surprise and delight, they'd heard of it! Unless they were thinking of the song. . .

Wikipedia

I can't think why I didn't start here first, as that's usually the go-to online source. I'm in the thick of it now, having entered "erie canal history" into the search space on Wikipedia's home page - the English language one.

I've been cruising the internet off and on for a week now, looking through Erie Canal-related websites, getting to know the ones that come up first on Google.
They've been kind of predictable -eriecanal.org for example-from an organization that promotes the canal as a tourist destination. They give a cursory history - dates etc. The National Parks service has a similar one - eriecanalways.org. Nuts and bolts information (assuming it's correct). Basic things that are necessary to know but pretty boring to read so I clicked on the link for the Albany to Buffalo Erie Canal Bike Ride and killed an afternoon on that...
But today I experienced my first Thrill of Discovery on the internet.

Someone named Paul Volpe, an American studies student at the University of Virginia, created an Erie Canal website for his MA thesis, and it's great. From the moment I read the first paragraph of his introduction I knew I was in the presence of a thoughtful writer, a careful researcher. It was just like opening a really good book, but I'll leave that thought for now.
Back to the Thrill of Discovery. In the history section, Mr. Volpe talks about a man named Jesse Hawley who is widely credited with the brainstorm that became the Erie Canal. While he was in jail for not being able to pay his debts (he was unlucky, apparently, in his chosen business as a flour trader) he wrote 14 articles under the pseudonym "Hercules" for a local newspaper in which he laid out in some detail his plans for a canal between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes.

That got my attention. I stopped reading Volpe's website and Googled Jesse Hawley. This is what I found:
The NYState Corrections history website entry on Hawley.
The address and opening hours of Hawley's home, now a museum, as well as information about him.
The Niagara County Historical Society's website entry on Hawley.
The address and photos of his gravesite and even more information about him.

An 1856 NYTimes article about a proposed monument for Hawley.

AND all 14 of his "Hercules" newspaper articles (Full disclosure. they were part of the appendices to DeWitt Clinton's memoir. A book. But still, I found it on the internet.) 

Fabulous reading. Different points of view, different but surprisingly not contradictory information, interesting connections. Such a pleasure.

Not that there weren't distractions. Once I got on the Correctional website, there was no way I was going to miss the aerial tour of Riker's Island in 1948!

ENTERING THE 21ST CENTURY

For some 15 years I've been writing an ongoing nonfiction series for Mikaya Press about things like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Great Wall of China, and the Inca city Machu Picchu.
When I do research for my books I'm very old school: I go to libraries, bookstores, museums, I interview experts, I visit the places I write about. When I go on the internet I go on Amazon.com, but that's just to find more books. And I go on museum websites, but only to find out when they're open.
The kids I talk to about research used to be old school, too, at least in the classroom. They're not any more. Kids now do all their research on the internet. Period.
Me, I've never quite trusted the internet. Because I'm so grounded in books, libraries, museums, etc., internet information seems somehow untethered, invalid, unreal to me. I'm not even comfortable with websites whose url ends in .edu.
Am I missing something? It's possible, and before the 21st century gets any older, I need to make an open-minded, whole-hearted effort to find out.
Here's the plan.
I'm starting a book about the Erie Canal this week, and I'm going to do ALL the research on the internet.
Why?
To satisfy my curiosity: what's out there in cyberspace? is it any good?
For the challenge: I've never been skillful at navigating the internet—will I be able to do it?
To get out of my comfort zone: there's nothing more exciting/disturbing than the possibility that the habits and assumptions of a lifetime will be overturned.
On to the 21st Century!