I know that the internet is renowned for its vast amount of information, a good bit of which is incorrect. So, I’m looking for information on slavery in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. When I type “slavery in Mexico” in Google, I get a few sites that look promising (but also a lot of junk). The websites themselves seem reliable enough, but each article seems to be written by a different person with no guarantee of a watchful editor checking the facts. I want to make sure my information is factually correct. If you have any knowledge of good websites on slavery or some kind of litmus test, I’d really appreciate it.
BTW, I know that I should look at books for more assurance in the factuality, and I probably will go to the library at some point. I’m not a huge fan of our public library, however, which has been unhelpful in research in the past. The more information I can find on the internet, the better.
One thing to recall is that there is no guarantee that books are accurate, either. David Irving’s Hiler’s War and Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe each attest to that point in different ways.
Among the things you can do to check your sources is to drop the names of the authors into Google, then look up their published works and look up reviews of those efforts.
Check out the sources that they cite. Are they primary sources? Or polemics written to lionize or condemn a particular person or group? (For that matter, do your sources appear to set out facts, or to argue a case? An author may, indeed, argue strongly for one point of view while still providing facts, but a lopsided argument that makes extraodrinary claims without support (or that argues one set of conclusions based on another set of conclusions instead of facts) is frequently suspect as a good source.
This is good advice, you might also find that some countries have government departments that contain good information. In New Zealand the Ministry of Culture and Heritage runs a website devoted to New Zealand history, maybe Mexico or Cuba have something similar (no doubt in Spanish!).
Wikipedia is devloping into quite a good resource as well (quite a few dopers are wikipedians). Here’s their article on slavery. Unfortuantely it doesn’t have much of what you’re looking for. Fortunately, once you find it, you’ll be able to add it to Wikipedia for the benefit of others…
So let me get this straight. You are going to the use the Internet as your primary sopurce of information, despite your own admission that a good bit of the information on the 'Net is incorrect. And you will probably go to the library at some point. And despite the fact that by your own admission, books are more assured of their factuality, you trust the Internet more then you do books. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
The mind boggles.
The Internet should be used as a secondary source and books/newspapers/magazines should be used as a primary source, for the simple reason that much of what is out there on the Internet is flat out untrue/lies/wrong.
But go ahead, be willful. Do it your way.:rolleyes:
Bogie, I suspect that you are casting the comparison between books and the internet in rather more absolute terms than is justified. For one thing, Azure specifically noted that the library has been unhelpful in the past. I can relate to that. My county library system is a nice little rural/exurban system that does a good job of meeting the needs of its primary clientele. On the other hand, I have frequently run up against a real lack of resources on several issues–subjects on which I was able to find far more information on the net. Even allowing for a two-day transfer of books among all the branches, there are thousands of subjects that simply not covered by our system.
And, as I have already noted, there is nothing golden about information bound up on sheets of paper. It is true that it is easier for people to use the internet to spread misinformation; someone who wishes to put lies into a book has to persuade a publisher and an editor that their lies will sell (or get past the editor’s fact checking with a plausible spiel). However, Irving and J. Philippe Rushton, and Kent Hovind have all been able to find publishers (to say nothing of Berlitz, von Daniken, and their ilk). (And even (formerly?) respected authors such as Stephen Ambrose have been caught reprinting information without checking their facts.)
If Azure Eternity is planning to write a monograph of his or her own, obviously s/he should be doing primary research on original materials. If s/he is doing a term paper, the instructor will make it clear how much printed material should have been included. For the purpose of becoming familar with the basic facts without having to drive to the central library of a major city or university, the internet should generally be adequate. And for a thorough grounding in a subject of the sort that the internet does not provide, the internet is still a good place to develop a bibliography. That is also a good way to check the validity of a web site: the lack of a bibliography should raise suspicions regarding the quality of the presentation (or a bilbiography in which all the titles have a single publisher may indicate just a bit of a bias).
Sorry it took me so long to respond; the website has been weird for me (not loading, things getting timed out, etc.) Thanks to everyone for responding. Tomndebb, you covered what I was going to say - our library isn’t that great, and I’ve already checked the online catalogue for books (it came up with lots of novels and woefully few non-fiction books). Besides, this is an outline which is supposed to acquaint us with the basic facts - if this were a research paper I would probably order some books off Amazon, but this is just some summer homework. Bayonet, I appreciate the offer, but I just need some general information about conditions, economic impact, etc. I’d hate to trouble you for information which should be easy to find.
Another way to dig up information using Google is to vary your search arguments. If “slavery Mexico” (Google’s going to ignore the “in”) has few good hits, try “slave trade Mexico” or “Mexico African slaves” or some other arguments.
Once you’ve got some hits, looking for .edu sites and checking the bibliography on each site should help keep the quality of information elevated. (And once you’ve got some sites, be sure to use the names of people or events or documents found on the sites to launch new searches.)