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

Rosemary Du Plessis

Now that Te Ara is about to launch our Economy and the City theme, it is time to introduce Rosemary Du Plessis, the editor of our next theme – Social Connections. Rosemary has been with us for the past year, drawing up the entry list, inviting contributors and now turning her expert eye to the entries flooding in.

Rosemary comes to us from Christchurch, where she lives on the Port Hills looking out over that wonderful plain to the Southern Alps. She has taught sociology for many years at the University of Canterbury. Involved in teaching hundreds of first year students, she has learned to make New Zealand’s social history, social change and its organisational structures accessible and interesting. She sympathises with Te Ara’s desire to make accurate research-based scholarship easily understood by our users.

But university teaching and research are just a small part of her rich professional career. Rosemary has strong connections with local community organisations and national associations such as the Women’s Studies Association, and has made distinguished contributions to the New Zealand National Commission for UNESCO, the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Toi te Taiao: the Bioethics Council. Not surprisingly, she writes, ‘I am fundamentally interested in how knowledge in the social sciences can be used to make sense of people’s lives, and inform both policy and the actions of individuals.’

Rosemary has contributed to many cross-disciplinary projects, most recently on a project ‘Constructive Conversations/Kōrero Whakaaetanga‘, where she learned much from work with Māori researchers. At UNESCO she collaborated with Māori and Pacific scholars questioning dominant ideas about knowledge, ethics and research. So she is sympathetic to Te Ara’s desire to involve and represent all the cultures of this country.

Rosemary has also had extensive experience as an editor, working on books and special issues of journals. In the time she has been with us she has already proved to be an outstanding wielder of the red pen, ensuring that our entries are clear, lively and accurate.

If it sounds as if we are extraordinarily pleased with ourselves to have Rosemary helming the Social Connections theme, then we’re happy to plead guilty. We hope you enjoy the fruits of her labours over the next year as we begin to release some great entries about the families, groups and relationships which make up New Zealand society.

Te Ara's new homepage

We’ve just launched the new Te Ara homepage, and we’re very proud.

Heath, our lead designer, blogged recently about our new homepage and other improvements you can expect on Te Ara this year. But now that it’s live, let’s have a wee tour.

The first thing you’ll notice – apart from how much more attractive it is – is the bigger, better featured-entry slideshow at the top. You’ll also notice that the page is much less brown.

Perhaps the biggest change is that the ‘Browse Te Ara’ Flash tool (we just call it our ‘browser’) isn’t immediately obvious. But it isn’t gone – just click the ‘Browse Te Ara’ button (right below the featured image, and next to the search box), and the ‘browser’ jauntily slides down. From here you can browse Te Ara’s entries by A–Z, by theme or by topic, and also you can browse ‘Your stories’ (stories contributed by members of the community) and entries that are translated into Te Reo Māori. Even better, the browser button is available at the top of every page of Te Ara.

You’ll also notice some new things down the side of the homepage:

• a new improved ‘Don’t miss’, where we feature one of our favourite resources (photos, videos, interactives, sound files and more)
• ways to contribute a story or subscribe to our newsletter
• a snippet of our latest blog post
• a slideshow of interesting things (this currently includes our most popular resource: Mr Blobfish).

Back in the main part of the homepage, you’ll find the ‘What’s inside…’ section, which shows the themes we already have in Te Ara. If you’re a frequent Te Ara user, this will be very familiar to you, and is a major way that people navigate through the encyclopedia. Below that you’ll find featured links from our sister sites NZLive.com and NZHistory.net.

And probably my favourite thing about our new homepage (apart from the lack of brown) is the thumbnails of photos that have been recently added to our Te Ara Flickr pool – a sneak peek at the photographic riches you’ll find there.

I hope you’ll love it as much as we do.

The sandfly menace

Sandflies and mosquitoes almost missed out being in Te Ara. We were just finishing The Bush theme when I happened to spend a few nights tramping near Blackball. The rata were in full flower and the views were glorious, but, boy, did we suffer from those huge fat West Coast sandflies and mossies!

Slowly the thought dawned – how could we present the New Zealand bush to the world and not tell people about the blood-suckers to be found there. So Carl Walrond sat down and wrote a great little entry on sandflies and mosquitoes.

The subject continues to attract interest. We have just received this comment from Mary Hallowell from Seattle, who seems to have suffered from them long after she left the South Island. This is her story – can you answer her questions?

I visited South Island, NZ in late November, returning to my home in Seattle, WA, USA, on Dec 1. I felt one severe itch on my hand and saw a tiny red mark before leaving NZ.

After I got home, more and more of these dreadfully itchy spots began to appear, mostly on my legs. I counted 15 on my left leg and probably 6–8 on my right leg. I could not resist scratching, undoubtedly making some of the spots worse. Our NZ guide said she thought these were sandfly bites, though I never saw an insect nor felt them bite at the time. The bites increased for some time, and the itching lasted most of December. I still have small bumps and scars where the spots were.

Is it actually possible that one or more of these little creatures could have travelled home with me in my clothing, or been concealed on my body somewhere? It seems astonishing to me that they could have lived that long. I do not believe I have any serious long term effects, but I would certainly like clarification on how this all could have occurred.

I returned from my Christmas holidays heartbroken. And, while I was sad, I’m pleased to have been reminded of that feeling you get when you meet someone you could fall in love with – that amazing feeling that I would risk a thousand heartbreaks for. This quiz is dedicated to the heartbroken, the lovesick and to those of you who are currently wrapped up in the midst of romance. Here’s to love.

To view the quiz you need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

Last year Te Ara made the biggest change since it launched, with our move to the Drupal content management system (CMS). However, on the surface little has changed. This is part of a series of posts that will try to explain why it’s exciting for us and why we hope it’s exciting for you. We’ve broken the story into three parts: Te Ara past, present and future.

Te Ara future

In part one and two I covered why we moved to the Drupal CMS, what we changed along the way, and suggested that the move allows Te Ara to evolve in the future. Well it’s twenty ten now … it is the future … what’s changing?

New homepage design (click for larger view)

Homepage version 3

It’s hard to know what should be on the homepage of an encyclopedia. Should it get out of the way and allow users to find the content they’re looking for – simply consisting of a range of navigation and search options. Should its primary focus be to promote elements of the diverse content within? Or should its focus be to indicate what’s new and fresh on the site?

We took on board what users were telling us and mixed it with the ideas from the Te Ara team. Looking back, we were trying to please everyone, and after a lot of wireframing and concepts, user testing confirmed we were trying to do too much.

The final design is far simpler, and I can’t wait for it to go live (by the end of next week) and see what our users think.

Regular publishing

Other than the four Places stories we publish each year, we publish one theme (consisting of around 100 stories) every 14 months. As each theme landed online it became obvious Te Ara needed to publish more often. Unfortunately, between our CMS and our internal workflow, it has been an enormous challenge to reach this goal. Our new CMS, Drupal, enables us to quickly assemble new content, get it signed off and publish it … in theory. We’re still tweaking the workflow process, but the goal will be reached, and all new stories will be published as they’re finished.

Integrating the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

Along with regular publishing, the encyclopedia will also be bolstered by the inclusion of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB). The DNZB contains over 3,000 biographies of people who have ‘made their mark’ on this country. Once migrated, we aim to link all mentions of these notable people in the encyclopedia to their biography.

Improved linking

Probably the biggest challenge facing us is improving the links between Te Ara content. Improving our related stories list is a small step towards improving linking, but our main focus is to introduce links throughout the text. So if a line mentions wētā it links to Wētā. Unfortunately, doing this dynamically has turned out to be incredibly complicated. We have since discovered there are teams around the world struggling with this same issue. A post about the issues, potential solutions, and our progress will be coming later in the year.

Other stuff to look forward to

The new media player (click for larger view)

Several other improvements and additions are planned for this year, including improving our search results, navigation and tweaking the design throughout the site.

This year we will also be including clips from from NZ on Screen and The New Zealand Film Archive, and will improve the way we compress and present video we receive from institutions like TVNZ, TV3, and Archives New Zealand. And wait there’s more! To go with this improved video presentation we are updating our media player.

Those are our priorities. What do you think we should change, fix, improve or even remove?