Te Ara Hiko

Te Ara Hiko (the digital pathway) is the newsletter from the Encyclopedia team. We hope that it will keep our writers and stakeholders up to date with progress and news about the project. If you would like to be added to (or removed from) our address list, please send an email message to janette.hart@mch.govt.nz.

Launching Te Ara: the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

We are delighted to announce that Prime Minister Helen Clark will officially launch Te Ara on 8 February 2005.

The launch will take place in Soundings Theatre at Te Papa at lunchtime. With the assistance of the Ministry of Education there will be a video link to schools around the country. They will be invited to participate by contributing performances or items about the communities represented in the first theme of Te Ara, ‘New Zealanders’.

There will be 96 entries in ‘New Zealanders’. These tell the stories of the major iwi (Māori tribes) of the country and of the other groups who have settled New Zealand – from the English, Scots and Irish to more recent arrivals such as Cambodians and Tokelauans. In addition there will be contextual essays on such subjects as Māori canoe traditions, citizenship, and immigration regulation. The aim of ‘New Zealanders’ is to welcome everyone in the country to Te Ara with at least one story about their own roots or heritage.

Another section of the website features major aspects of New Zealand life. ‘New Zealand in Brief’ covers Māori, history, the natural environment, economy, society, government and nation, sports and leisure, and arts and culture.

A third offering is a complete, searchable version of the three-volume 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand.

Unofficially the site, still in construction, will be tested from the beginning of December.

A sound and light show

When Te Ara goes live, every entry will be enriched with images, sound files or moving images.

Over the past year the resources team – led by Shirley Williams – have located and prepared 2,616 resources. That’s about one for every 125 words. They include:

• 158 maps
• 44 graphs
• 10 diagrams
• 31 whakapapa
• 82 moving images sourced from films and television
• 89 sound files, from old radio recording to oral histories
• 2,202 images including paintings, cartoons, and photographs

Many of these images are from archives and museums around the country. They have also been sourced from newspaper collections, especially the New Zealand Herald and the Otago Daily Times. Photographers on the encyclopedia staff have also been out and about with cameras at the ready.

Once the resources are located there is much more to do, from clearing copyright, to writing and editing captions, optimising the images and sound files for the web, and creating thumbnail versions of every image.

What's my story?

One of the goals of the encyclopedia project has been to find ways of involving the community in the building of Te Ara. Over last summer we invited people to send in stories about their voyage to New Zealand, or about an ancestor’s voyage.

We were staggered at the response. Over 250 contributions poured in, many of them with photos. Many told of the perils of the 19th-century journey out in small sailing ships. There were sad tales of babies lost, and recollections of drunken doctors, of the smell of pigs and the taste of stale water. We also received many happier descriptions from ‘Captain Cookers’ – British immigrants of the 1950s who were crammed into six-berth cabins on the Captain Cook, where they were fed propaganda about the wonders of New Zealand.

But terror and adventure occurred even in the 20th century. One correspondent told of how his family set off from England in the Queen Mary in 1949. The first stop was Cherbourg in France. In pitch darkness the anchor snagged an anti-submarine cable and the ship threatened to drift towards a sunken wreck which would have pierced its hull. Eventually the big ship ran aground on a sandbar, and then returned to Southampton to have its hull plugged with concrete. After five days they set off again – into an Atlantic storm. They reached New York, went by train to San Francisco, but by then had lost their air booking to New Zealand. The only option was a troop carrier of the Siamese Air Service. Their seats on the aircraft were stretched canvas, their beds were air mattresses ‘which we inflated by removing a centre bung from one of the small viewing windows and pushing the tube into the slipstream’. There were huge bumps when the plane hit air pockets, and finally, after 26 days Chris and Julia Thorogood reached the tranquil shores of 1940s Auckland.

The best of these stories will be published in Te Ara in a section featuring the voyage out to New Zealand.

Blast from the past – The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, 1966

One of the resources available to the users of the new site will be a complete online version of The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand.

This was published in 1966 under the editorship of the Parliamentary historian, A. H. McLintock. Put together by a team of only three, it took six years to prepare, and consists of:

• 473 thematic entries
• 241 natural science entries
• 292 entries on places
• 722 biographies

This is a total of 1,728 entries and about 2 million words. The digitisation was accomplished in India under a contract with the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre at Victoria University. The 600 line drawings, maps and graphs are also scanned, and the text is presented in sections for easy browsing. Apart from the inclusion of a small number of corrections which were published at the time, we have made no other corrections or updates to the text.

Although some of the material is now dated and tends to have an institutional bias, McLintock’s encyclopaedia remains a very valuable reference work. 34,000 copies of the three volumes were originally printed, and 31,000 sold within two months. It has never been reprinted.

In the short term, we see this resource as offering comprehensive information while Te Ara is under construction. Beyond that, it will also be of interest as a time capsule – users can click from contemporary ideas to the views of 1966. Some issues which have become complex today were then regarded as clear cut. Others which received extensive coverage are no longer of burning interest. New discoveries have outdated some of the factual information, and some articles seem old fashioned as we gain new perspectives. Nevertheless it is a mine of useful information.

We have branded the material with 1960s motifs, so that it will be clear this is not a new production. The home page will feature a ‘Blast from the Past’ – a changing selection of widely varied topics such as duels, ‘Zealandia’, go-karting, Pelorus Jack and sandflies.

When was New Zealand first settled?

There has been much discussion around the Te Ara tea table as to when the country was first settled.

Initially we had not planned an entry on the topic, but it became clear from Geoffrey Irwin’s entry on Polynesian voyaging that the date of first arrival and settlement was highly contentious and worth a richer exploration. So staff writer Carl Walrond set out to research the matter, encountering the technical intricacies of radiocarbon dating and poring over images of rat bones. His draft was then sent out for comment to specialists – David Lowe, Bruce McFadgen, Janet Wilmshurst and Kevin Jones. We are confident that the conclusion – that Polynesian people had settled in New Zealand by 1300 – is in accord with current ideas. But we also suspect that this will stir up more debate. The value of an online encyclopedia, which can be constantly updated, is likely to be proved by this entry alone.

The interactive cube

Users of Te Ara who are interested in immigration to New Zealand will be able to play with an exciting graphic interactive which provides fascinating insights into the character of the British and Irish settlers of New Zealand.

The interactive was developed under a Microsoft Innovation Centre Award to the encyclopedia project. Users submit an ‘Ask Jeeves’-type question in plain English about British immigration and are linked to a variety of charts. Their questions can then be tweaked to refine the search, and the charts themselves can be customised for colour and design. A bar chart, for example, can be changed instantly into a pie graph.

The database is a scientific sample, from information recorded in death registers, of data about more than 14,000 immigrants to New Zealand.. The information allows users to research such questions as when immigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales came to New Zealand,and what were their regions of origin, their religion, marital status and occupational background and the gender balance.

Iwi entries

The first theme of Te Ara will include 36 entries on the major iwi of the country.

They discuss such questions as:

• Waka (canoes)
• Whakapapa (ancestors)
• Whakataukī and pepeha (traditional sayings)
• Tribal boundaries and resources
• Cultural icons such as maunga (mountains) and awa (rivers)
• Major historical events
• Iwi today, including migrations

In preparing this material Te Ara staff have had the support of Te Ara Wānanga (the encyclopedia’s Māori advisory committee), and have received great assistance from iwi throughout the country. Many have also provided images of important places and carvings.

All the iwi entries will be presented in both English and te reo Māori. The huge job of translating and editing the Māori-language version has fallen on the shoulders of Rangi McGarvey. With his son Tamahou, Rangi has prepared first drafts in Māori. These have then gone to Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori (the Māori Language Commission) for peer review before being returned to the authors for their final approval.

Users will be able to toggle between the Māori and English versions of entries, and it is hoped that this will help to make these entries of particular value for people learning the Māori language and for use in kura kaupapa Māori.

Earth, Sea and Sky

As we put the finishing touches to ‘New Zealanders’ the writing team is hard at work preparing material for the second theme. This will explore the shaping forces of New Zealand’s natural environment – the earth, the sea and the sky. It will include both natural science and human interaction.

In the Earth section:

• New Zealand rocks and geological processes – the geological structure of New Zealand and some of its special stones such as pounamu and greywacke.
• Natural hazards – some of the cataclysmic events of our geological and human history, such as earthquakes, volcanic explosions, tsunami and landslides.
• Natural resources – an overview of the reserves of natural resources and the quest to recover them, including the gold rushes and coal miners.

In the Sky section:

• New Zealand’s night sky, including Māori use of the stars for navigation
• The weather
• People and the sky, including ballooning, parachuting and aircraft.

In the Sea section:

• Physical oceanography including currents and the sea floor
• Ecosystems ranging from the deep sea to the estuary
• Fish – from sharks and stingrays to the bizarre fish of the deep
• Mammals of the sea such as dolphins and whales
• Sea birds including albatrosses and penguins
• Plants including seaweeds
• The Māori view and uses of the sea
• Economy and the sea, with entries on lighthouses, shipwrecks and whaling
• Recreation and the sea, from big game fishing to yachting

Major supporting institutions

Te Ara has received extraordinary support from many collecting and research institutions in the preparation of entries

We will recognise their contribution by featuring them on the site. They will also be able to use the Te Ara logo on their own publicity.

The first formal agreement under this provision has been with the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS). GNS, a Crown Institute, has agreed to provide expertise to Te Ara in the preparation of relevant entries and to allow the use of its extensive collection of photographs and other graphic material.

Similar agreements are also being developed with two other Crown Research Institutes, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and Manaaki Whenua: Landcare Research.

Staff news

As we move into the preparation of the next theme, the staff has been bolstered by a number of people with particular expertise in natural science.

The theme editor for Earth, Sea and Sky is Simon Nathan. Simon is an earth scientist whose areas of expertise include web design and dissemination of data, digital terrain models, regional geology and volcanology. He was formerly on the GNS staff, and is a past president of the Geological Society of New Zealand. Simon has recently been writing a biography of the plate tectonics theorist Harold Wellman.

Gerard Hutching joins the team as a science writer. He has worked as a scientific journalist and has written several natural history books including The Natural World of New Zealand.

Maggy Wassilieff, science writer, has a PhD in plant ecology and has worked as a science editor and secondary school teacher.

Christina Troup completed her Masters of Applied Science with a thesis on the Southern Royal Albatross. She has worked as a research assistant on a number of natural science projects, and has just completed a contract research position with DOC.

Meanwhile existing members of the team have been unusually productive over the past year. In addition to writing nine entries, Carl Walrond also fathered a delightful daughter, Greta. Not to be outdone, editor Fiona Oliver produced Mathilde to go beside the 70 entries she has edited. Both new additions are proud wearers of the corporate uniform.

For more on the members of the team, look here.

Other news

• Aussie encyclopedia? Over the past year members of the Te Ara staff have made many presentations about the project to groups throughout the country. The demand has even come from across the Tasman where a computing arts conference was held in Newcastle to push for an Australian encyclopedia. A presentation of the mockup design of Te Ara was enthusiastically received.
• Best award: Te Ara has already won its first award. In the recent BeST awards offered by the Designers Institute of New Zealand, Paul Johnson of Designworks won the category of graphic design arts for his arresting logo for Te Ara. It is exciting to have this professional endorsement for what we all think is a brilliantly evocative design. It has been beautifully complemented by the look and feel of the website prepared for us by Shift.