Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Whew!! – after months of hard work, The Settled Landscape was launched on Monday in a fitting place: the Massey University Agriculture and Horticulture lecture block in Palmerston North.  We decked it out with posters and two continuous slide shows of rural images.  We herded guests into the auditorium with sounds of shepherds whistling, dogs barking and mutterings of ‘get in behind’.  Like well-trained flocks, the guests obeyed! Afterwards the tables of food were fenced with wooden gates.

Cattle ingenuity

The Settled Landscape has taught us, especially the city slickers, a lot.  Some of it – such as the details of animal diseases – we may want to forget.  But we have also been struck by the inventiveness of the farming community.  The contemporary New Zealand push is that we should leave behind our grass roots and enter a bright new world of ‘creative industries’.  However, after a year working on this theme, it is the creativity of the farming community which stands out.  I am not just talking about good old-fashioned Kiwi ingenuity, the number 8 wire syndrome.  After all, as the fencing entry tells us, the number 8 wire was superseded by the 12.5 gauge wire after research in the 1960s. Take a look at the clever industrial process which produces it today.  Earlier – in the late 1930s – two New Zealanders, Bill Gallagher and Herbert Christie, working separately, designed the electric fence.

It is worth considering some other examples of rural creativity to be found in The Settled Landscape’:

• the breeding of sheep – from the Corriedale (which now vies with the Merino as the world’s most common breed) to the Romney and Perendale, breeds now improved by use of a genetic database
• Godfrey Bowen’s development of his distinctive ‘long bow’ style of shearing
• the development of new types of apples beautifully illustrated in this whakapapa
• the domestication and farming of deer, in which New Zealand leads the world
• the use of border-dyke irrigation
• the development of the English and Scottish A & P show into a community event which attracts women as well as men, and townies as well as farming types
• distinctive words – ‘jingling johnnies’ (shears) were used on ‘gummies’ (sheep with sticky wool)
• buildings – such as the ‘futtah’ for storing food, or the herringbone and rotary milking sheds
• rural clothing like the famous black singlet and the swanndri. Fred Dagg immortalised the singlet – and, if you think farming types have no sentiment, just watch how one farmer finds a new use for his swannis!

So take a look at The Settled Landscape, enjoy it, and we won’t be surprised if you treat your country cousins with a new respect.

For the last year or so we’ve been beavering away at our new theme – The Settled Landscape – and now it’s all finished! The Settled Landscape tells the story of New Zealand’s transformation from bush to farmland, and has entries on farming and rural life.

We made our new theme live on the site late last week, as the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed, and we’re giving it an official launch at Massey University in Palmerston North this afternoon.

We’ll tell you more about it over the next few days, but in the meantime, have a look at The Settled Landscape.

A resource meeting in progress

Continuing our series of posts about how Te Ara comes into being, one of our resourcers tells us what they do.

In the bizarre and wonderful world of Te Ara a resourcer, or resource researcher, is one of the people who find the images, video, sound, maps, ephemera and so on that sit alongside, and hopefully enhance, the text. Like me! And Emily, and Marguerite. We also have a manager, Janine (job description: ‘herding cats’), and two lovely copyright administrators, Phil ‘n Andy.

After the text for a Te Ara entry has been written and checked, but before it is edited, a copy of it comes to a resourcer. We have around a week (fingers crossed) to read it, understand it, and come up with lots of ideas of suitable resources to sit alongside it. Then we take our suggestions to a meeting that involves the writer, theme editor, resource team manager, the general editor and uncle Tom Cobbley and all, where we present our ideas and they get discussed and (hopefully) agreed upon.

Although our imaginations are unlimited, there are a few practical things we need to keep in mind, such as the budget (limited), timeframe (limited), and the availability of the resources. Because of this the more resources that are made available online, the happier we are. These days we are very happy, especially with some of New Zealand’s local collections such as the Palmerston North Library’s digital library coming online.

Other sources depend a lot on what theme we are working on. The GNS Science and the Department of Conservation photograph collections were incredibly helpful for the Earth, Sea and Sky and The Bush themes. The Settled Landscape saw us digging through the collections of AgResearch, Hortresearch and a number of other rural-minded institutions. And as for the new theme, Economy and the City - it already looks like we will be hitting the various city archives heavily.

After the resource meeting there are a lot of less fascinating but important bits to do, such as entering each resource in the database we use. This helps us remember to order a copy of it in time, and also makes sure the resource goes up attached to the correct entry, in the correct order - no-one wants to see elephant seals in the farm families entry.

Resourcers then need to create a document for writers to write the captions in, order the resources from the many institutions we deal with, save them into our file system when they arrive, make sure the credit information is correct, and so on. We’re also involved in drafting the maps, graphs, diagrams and interactives that our beloved designers (grovel grovel) then make - the drafts and their attached tracking forms are known in our lingo as the ‘dreaded yellow sheets’.

Whew!

Continuing our series of posts about how Te Ara comes into being, one of our in-house writers writes about writing.

Telling people you are a writer sounds pretentious so I tell them I’m a writer/researcher, which just confuses them. Being a writer for Te Ara involves three main jobs:

• writing (obviously)
• checking
• captioning.

Writing/researching

In The Settled Landscape theme I have written entries on things like rural workers and hunting.  Writing an entry involves researching and then condensing information into plain English pages of around 500 words. The style must be concise and hopefully interesting.

Checking

Entries written by external experts are assigned to in-house writers to check. That is make sure that facts (dates, figures etc) are correct, and that the entry is balanced in terms of the sources that it draws upon.  It can be difficult for external writers as they are not always aware of the scope of their entry. They sometimes stray into areas covered by other Te Ara entries, so in many cases some structural editing is needed.

Writers also write captions for these entries (see below). In The Settled Landscape I have checked entries on topics such as hops, hemp and tobacco and rural clothing.

Fisherman with chiselled jaw

Captioning

Writing captions to go with the pictures, videos and other resources that accompany each entry on Te Ara is another task for writers. The word count in captions can be almost as high as the word count of the main entry text, so it is a big part of the job. Some images have plenty of background information with them, but sometimes the image has nothing - not even where or when the image was taken. These often end up having shortish captions! My favourite image in The Settled Landscape is the chiselled jaw of the chap in the picture on the left – he graces a poster advertising fishing for the government tourist department, which is in the Freshwater fishing entry.

On to the editors

All text (entries and captions) go from writers to copy editors, who edit for grammatical errors, readability etc. They remove jargon, repetition, over-writing, flowery language, grand-standing, axe-grinding, barrow-pushing, preaching and scores of other writers’ crimes. They are the readers’ advocates, who get the copy ready for publishing to the web.

You'll see lots of these in our next theme – The Settled Landscape

In just over a week’s time we will go live with our next theme, The Settled Landscape. There’ll be 97 sparkling new entries, covering the introduction of exotic plants and animals to New Zealand, the story of farming, and the characteristics of country life.

So if you’re keen to know about magpies, hedgehogs and bees, or the different kinds of sheep breeds, or the story of country shows, then The Settled Landscape will provide the answers.

In the build up to the theme release, we thought we’d give you an insight into the process of how we get there.

It all begins with the appointment of a Theme Editor – someone who knows about the subjects we are dealing with and, more importantly, knows the people who know about the subjects. We call on the best and the brightest around the country. Just this week we began advertising for an editor for the theme after next – on Social Connections, which will include things like families and voluntary groups.

Allan Gillingham, take a bow

Our Theme Editor for The Settled Landscape has been Allan Gillingham. Born on a dairy farm on the West Coast, Allan had a long career as a farm manager, a researcher with AgResearch, and an academic at Massey University.

Allan’s role began when he sat down with me to draw up a list of entries that we wanted to include in The Settled Landscape. We then called together an advisory committee of people who knew about different aspects of farming and country life, and we ran the list past them. Following their feedback, we cut out some entries, added others, combined a few, and then settled on word lengths for each.

Then Allan and myself brainstormed possible writers for each entry. About half were written by our team of in-house writers, and the other half by journalists, and people in universities and Crown research institutes throughout the country.

As the entries come in the Theme Editor has to look at them closely, decide whether they are fair and accurate, and how they need to be revised to make them work well on the web. Then we sit around a table to choose images or film clips, and the Theme Editor is there to give suggestions and advice. Every diagram or map that our designers draw goes past the Theme Editor for approval, and they often have to answer curly questions fired at them by the editors.

When the entries go up on the web, the Theme Editor must give them all a close check. And when the theme is finally launched, the Theme Editor must go out and sell it, and respond to the many congratulations – and the very few complaints – that flow in.

It’s a great job, but a demanding one. So thank you Allan – you have done it brilliantly, and your humorous presence around the table has been a delight. On the 24th of November, when The Settled Landscape goes live, I hope you take a well-deserved bow.