Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artifact NYPlottings for Surveys of the Erie Canal, 1817 Cynthia Van Ness (bio) In 1866, when William C. Young donated his atlas of Erie Canal survey maps to the Buffalo Historical Society, today known as the Buffalo History Museum, he was a retired railroad engineer. Young was a member of our then four-year-old organization, which, at the time, was primarily a social club of wealthier men who collected relics and presented papers to one another. In 1817, Young was appointed by engineer Benjamin Wright to one of the survey parties charged with laying out the precise route of the Erie Canal. Just eighteen years old, he served as a rodman under surveyor Nathan S. Roberts. A cousin of William Young through marriage, Roberts is best remembered today for designing the Flight of Five locks in Lock-port, New York. Young’s team surveyed the canal route from Rome, New York, west to the Seneca River and from Rome east to Schoharie Creek. This 150-mile section was called the Middle Division. These surveys formed the basis of all subsequent canal construction plans and cost estimates. At the conclusion of the canal survey project, Young entered West Point and graduated in 1822. He served at various Army posts until 1826. Resigning his army commission, he began a career in railroad surveying and engineering, working throughout New York State and in Iowa, Canada, and Panama. In 1855, he was appointed superintendent of the western division of the New York Central Railroad (NYCRR), assuming responsibility for all two hundred miles of NYCRR’s lines west of Rochester. After his retirement, he settled in New York City but maintained a membership in the Buffalo Historical Society. He died in New York City in 1893 at the age of ninety-four. On January 15, 1866, William Young read a paper before the members of the Buffalo Historical Society recounting the 1816–1817 canal survey. The survey party faced a host of dangers and obstacles: rattlesnakes, mosquitos, disease, noxious weeds, oppressive heat, undrinkable swamp water, minimal protection from the elements, and a diet usually [End Page 287] Click for larger view View full resolution Map XIII, Little Falls, Reminiscences of Erie Canal Surveys in 1816–1817. This map is one of the few that does not spread over two pages. The draftsman took a special interest in rendering the waterway, using gray tones for extra definition.(courtesy of the buffalo history museum.) limited to hard bread and salt pork. In the vicinity of Herkimer, New York, he described an unanticipated annoyance: sightseers. In it there lived, at the time of our passing on this survey, a family of some note and bearing, acquaintances of our Engineer. He entertained them in sighting through the telescope of the leveling instruments, which reversed all objects looked at; apparently, persons would be seen standing on their heads, herds of animals with feet in the air, trees standing on their boughs. This magical effect preceded the surveying party in notoriety, and brought crowds of visitors to our camp and field operations to see the curiosity. This annoyed our Chief Engineer beyond all description, who was cross and crabbed, petulant and uncongenial to all save his set of personal associates. The volume Young presented to the Buffalo Historical Society in 1866 consists of sixteen hand-drawn, hand-colored surveyor maps from 1816 and 1817 covering the Erie Canal route from Rome, New York, west to Montezuma Swamp and east to Albany, New York, with scales between twenty and two hundred chains to an inch. The canal route is shown [End Page 288] in red. The renderings are unsigned but were possibly made by Nathan S. Roberts, the only individual that Young credited in his essay with making drawings. It appears to be the companion volume to a set of nineteen maps in the New York State Archives known as the Geddes Maps. As such, we believe our volume has the oldest surviving maps of the Erie Canal, as it begins in Rome, where the canal groundbreaking was celebrated on July 4, 1817. Young’s Reminiscences of Erie Canal Surveys in 1816–1817 have been digitized and are available online...
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".