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

Voters at election booths, 2008

It has been fascinating to observe the speed with which New Zealanders have put winning the seventh Rugby World Cup behind them and turned their attention to the country’s 50th parliamentary elections.

As a political scientist, I personally applauded the prime minister’s decision to forego the usual petty politicking that surrounds the choice of an election date and, instead, announce the date of the election 10 months in advance. At the same time I wondered whether the five-week period between the final of the Rugby World Cup on 23 October and the general election on 26 November would provide enough time for people to switch focus. I am happy to say that the answer appears to be yes.

Less than a week after the final rugby referee’s whistle had been blown, the minor party leaders held their first televised debate, and the following evening the two prime ministerial contenders – Phil Goff and John Key – squared off on Television One. Radio programmes have been replete with political interviews, and referendum ‘specials’ have already been broadcast on radio and television, as well as published in a host of newspapers.

I’m delighted to say that Te Ara, too, is playing its part in putting the election into perspective.

Seven entries in Te Ara’s Government and Nation theme have been deliberately fast-tracked through the editorial production-line and are now available for all to see on New Zealand’s online encyclopedia.

Each of the entries is of relevance to elections in New Zealand, and every one of them has been written by an expert in the field. In alphabetical order, the entries are:

• Electoral systems
• Labour Party
• Māori representation
• National Party
• Parliament
• Political parties
• Premiers and prime ministers

The entries have been written by well-known historians (such as John E. Martin and Gavin McLean), political analysts (such as Colin James and Rawiri Taonui) and political scientists (such as Peter Aimer, Jennifer Curtin and Raymond Miller).

Each of the entries in this ‘election special’ will provide anyone reading them with a great deal of authoritative information about the history and politics of New Zealand.

What is more, a tool that has been specially created for Te Ara is now available online for the very first time. It charts the numbers of seats held by political parties (as well as by independent MPs) in the House of Representatives after every election from 1890 through to and including 2008 (and, yes, the results of the 2011 election will be added once they’re known).

As one of the co-editors of Te Ara’s Government and Nation theme, I cannot give enough thanks to Heath Sadlier and his creative design team for the work that has been done to bring this idea to fruition. To see the explanatory and teaching power of the chart, go – for example – to the chart headed Parties making up Parliament, 1949–1984 and click on the election years from 1960 through to 1975.

You will get a clear picture of the glacial decline in National’s share of the seats in the House of Representatives in the three general elections that followed the party’s election victory in 1960, and you will then see how the party’s dramatic loss of office in 1972 was literally mirrored in its return to power in 1975.

Likewise, the chart labelled Distribution of parties in Parliament, 1996–2008 shows the changing patterns of representation in the House of Representatives and the consequent coalitions during the MMP (mixed-member proportional representation) era in New Zealand.

Our sister site, NZHistory.net also has good features on Election Days and The road to MMP.

We don’t know what’s going to happen when New Zealand’s 50th parliamentary elections are held in three-and-a-half weeks’ time. After nearly half a century of studying elections in New Zealand and overseas, I have learnt that one must frequently expect the unexpected.

As a result, I am going to be paying particular attention to a line in one of the entries in Te Ara’s election package. It’s in the Premiers and prime ministers entry, and it reads: ‘Thirty-eight prime ministers have led New Zealand since the country was granted internal self-government by Britain in 1856.’

Will that line have to be altered as a result of how we vote on Saturday, 26 November?

This post is a quick overview of the Te Ara redesign. I’ll do a more detailed post in a month or two. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

If you take a look at Te Ara today, you’ll find a few things have changed around here. We’ve had a redesign!

Last year we noticed people were having problems navigating through our stories and weren’t noticing some features. Also, anecdotal evidence suggested that many people loved reading Te Ara, but not on screen, which is a bit of a worry … for a website. A full site redesign is always going to be very time consuming and there is temptation to make radical changes. The danger is that radical changes can introduce as many issues as they solve.

However, a lot has changed in the world of the web since Te Ara was first launched in 2005, and we decided it was time for some improvements and a freshen-up.

The redesign keeps many elements from the original Te Ara design, but we made six main changes…

1) Improving the presentation of content

Enlarging the size of the content area meant the size of text could be increased. As well as increasing the font size, the stories now have larger margins, bigger line spacing and other changes that make the text easy to read or scan through. Also, the off-white background used in the redesign reduces eye-strain during long stints of reading, while maintaining ideal text contrast.

2) Better display for the main navigation

Te Ara has a really handy multi-column browser that allows you to find Te Ara’s stories through different categories. Chances are you didn’t know that, as only about 2% of users opened it. In the redesign the first column of categories is displayed as horizontal navigation items.

The categories take you to a new full-page browser that allows for much larger text and longer story names.

3) Better display for the ’short story’

Every story on Te Ara has a ’short story’ – an easy-to-read summary created for younger readers, but which also serves as a quick overview of the full story. The short story (like the browser) was hidden away and (also like the browser) only a small percentage of users found it. To simplify the structure of the stories – and to help people find the short story – we merged it with the story front page.

4) Improve usability

Improving usability was probably the most complicated of the changes. We were lucky to work with Optimal Usability, who helped us resolve some of the issues with the site. We made a lot of changes to the way you navigate each story and how your position in the story is displayed.

5) Modernise the look and feel

After attending Daniel Burka’s ‘Creating simple: Techniques for simplifying your UI and your CSS/HTML’ workshop at Webstock last year, I started considering ways of simplifying Te Ara. I could go into a lot of detail about the changes, but the main change I made to the design was to remove as many unnecessary elements as possible.

The old design had a lot of containers, highlighted above.

In the new design the only containers left outside the main article space are there to group menu elements and increase the text contrast. This goes a long way to making the design feel clean and simple, as well as help users make their way around the different sections of the page.

6) Simplify the HTML & CSS, and speed up the performance of the site

At the same workshop, Daniel showed us a way to use PHP to generate CSS, allowing the use of variables… whoops, I am getting a bit technical. The essence is that Te Ara’s 50 colour schemes could be generated in a much simpler way. We also moved to HTML5 and CSS3, which allow us to drastically reduce the amount of code – this makes the web pages load faster in your browser, and makes it easier for us to change things behind the scenes. CSS3 features such as opacity and rounded corners are only supported by the latest browsers, but degrade gracefully in older browsers.

There are a lot of other techniques we used to improve the performance of the site and we’re still looking at ways to better optimise the new design.

That’s enough from me, go browse the site, read a short story, read a full story or two, explore the images and media, and come back here and let us know what you think.

In late 2009, when Stephen Levine and I lodged a joint application to be co-editors of the Government and Nation theme for Te Ara, New Zealand’s official online encyclopedia, we thought the work would be interesting and challenging.

We were certainly right there!

In 2010 our first two tasks as co-editors were to define the scope of the theme and to come up with a list of roughly 100 topics that would be included in the section of the encyclopedia focused on Government and Nation.

Stephen and I fairly quickly decided that the Government and Nation theme should centre on the establishment and evolution of a New Zealand approach to government, and on the development of a sense of nationhood.

We divided the theme into seven broad sub-themes: from colony to independence, institutions of government, public policy, defence and war, New Zealand and the world, participation and citizenship, and symbols of nationhood.

Once we’d agreed on these parameters, we turned our attention to the specific areas that needed to be covered. They included topics such as the Declaration of Independence – Te Wakaputanga, Parliament, the judicial system, the musket wars, the First World War, the Second World War; empire and Commonwealth, relations with the US, New Zealand’s party system, political values, New Zealand identity, the national anthem and the capital city.

Discussion and debate about the topics with Jock Phillips, Te Ara’s general editor, followed, and after the three of us had reached agreement on the topics, we submitted the full list of 102 topics to two advisory groups: Te Ara Wānanga (chaired by Dr Ranginui Walker) and a theme advisory committee (chaired by Sir Geoffrey Palmer) for their consideration and approval. The advice and encouragement that the members of both bodies gave us – based on years of academic and practical experience – was invaluable.

What is more, the fact that both the wānanga and the advisory committee endorsed the list of the Government and Nation topics that we’d constructed gave us the green light we needed to go ahead and commission authors to write the encyclopedia entries.

An insight into the importance of Te Ara was the willingness of the people we approached to write for the online encyclopedia. A range of outtsanding senior diplomats, geographers, historians, law professors, public servants and political scientists – to mention just a few of the most obvious categories of contributors – agreed to contribute to Te Ara (usually without any hesitation whatsoever). I found this not only encouraging, but also frankly heart-warming. It’s an instance of Kiwis not standing on ceremony and pitching-in together.

For the past 10 months contributions for the Government and Nation theme have been coming in from authors, and we are in the process of preparing them for publication on the web.

I said at the start of this blog that Stephen and I thought the work would be interesting and challenging, and how right we were. What I hadn’t realised, though, was just how much fun the work would be. The staff in Te Ara’s open-plan office have got used to hearing peals of laughter whenever writers, theme editors and the encyclopedia’s gifted team of resourcers get together to choose illustrations to accompany the online stories. Five people arguing about which is the best of, say, four possible photos to accompany a paragraph in a Te Ara entry tends to generate a lot of both good-natured heat and intense light.

From now until the middle of 2012, entries in the Government and Nation theme are going to be rolled out – that is, they are going to go live online. We have chosen the entry about New Zealand’s postage stamps to start the process.

One of New Zealand's rarest stamps

All countries promote themselves via their stamps. New Zealand is no exception to this rule, and a great deal about New Zealand’s view of itself can be seen in the country’s postage stamps.

When New Zealand was a young British colony, Queen Victoria’s image adorned our stamps. However, in the late 19th century New Zealand became one of the first countries in the world to put scenic views on its stamps. As the entry in the encyclopedia notes, ‘The first pictorial stamps, in 1898, recognised that stamps had propaganda value.’ More than a hundred years later, we’re still using stamps to promote the idea that New Zealand is clean and green.

The Te Ara entry about stamps was written by Carl Walrond – the grandson of a pre-eminent New Zealand stamp dealer. It’s a colourful and fascinating account of the subject. You could say that it literally puts its stamp on Te Ara’s Government and Nation theme.

‘I could hear the children screaming in the classrooms, I kept calling out ‘turtle turtle’ like we’d practised but they were too scared to remember what to do.

This story by ‘Katie‘ on the QuakeStories.govt.nz website is just one of over a hundred that have been submitted since the site was ‘soft launched’ at the beginning of August. QuakeStories has been developed by Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in partnership with NV Interactive, a Christchurch-based web-design company. The goal is to create a ‘living memorial’ of the earthquakes of 2010–11, which are among the most significant events in New Zealand history.

The stories submitted so far range in length from a couple of sentences to highly detailed 5,000+ word diary-like entries. It is estimated that more than 100,000 words – an average PhD thesis – have been contributed in the first month. Some are light-hearted, many are harrowing – on the site’s Twitter account one person posted, ‘Thank you these are amazing stories, I can only read 1 or 2 at a time’.

They include stories from a lawyer stuck on the 15th floor of the Forsyth Barr building, an ex-nurse who found herself on triage duty in the CBD, an eight-year-old boy who had to quickly escape his classroom, and an amazingly detailed and powerful account of the four hours a man spent with his two pre-schoolers trying to get to his older daughter’s school following the 22 February quake.

While people’s experiences of the main quakes and their aftershocks will inevitably be popular topics, we’re also keen to encourage stories about what is happening to people now and how the ongoing rebuilding of Canterbury continues to affect their lives in the months to come. We also welcome stories from non-Cantabrians who have been impacted by the quakes in different ways.

QuakeStories has a simple design which encourages visitors to browse the stories that have been submitted and makes it easy for them to contribute their own. This is very much phase one of the site and there are big plans for its future. In the coming weeks the contributors will be able to upload images, with provision for adding audio and video further down the track. The collected memories will start to be sorted and arranged by date, location (maps) and topics, giving readers new ways to explore the material.

One model that we looked to when we were setting up the site was the Hurricane Katrina archive. While this is an excellent resource, recent developments in technology mean we can add new dimensions to our record such as harvesting and categorising the #eqnz twitter feed, encouraging people to record video and audio with their smart phones and creating 3-D models of the former cityscape. We can also draw on the rich content in Te Ara and other websites to present contextual information back to the public in accessible ways. Encouraging school teachers and their students to both contribute to the site and use it for projects is definitely on our radar.

If you have memories of the Canterbury earthquakes and their aftermath – whatever your age, whether you’re an individual, part of a community, a business or an organisation, whether you were in Christchurch or involved in other ways – please consider sharing your experiences on QuakeStories. It is history in the making.

With both excitement and a sense of relief, we have just celebrated the launch of Roadside Stories, an audio tour of New Zealand, which presents 110 four- to five-minute tales about people, events and natural features along the main roads of this marvellous country.

The relief comes from the fact that this has been a long project which has proved far more challenging and groundbreaking than I personally had ever expected. It was over 18 months ago, when the Rugby World Cup was just a distant mirage, that Briony Ellis, director of the REAL New Zealand Festival, casually suggested that it would be great for visitors to the cup to have some short audio introductions to places they’ll pass as they take the long way by road between games. She recalled how as a child her parents had read out aloud Diana and Jeremy Pope’s magnificent Mobil guides to New Zealand as they drove to new places around the country. She suggested that it would be nice for tourists to have that experience too.

I also hugely admired the ‘Pope’s guides,’ as we called them, and at one stage had even lobbied for the books to be awarded a prize as the best contribution to New Zealand history over the previous three years. So I could not let Briony’s idea go. I talked through the possibilities with Te Ara’s wonderful lead designer, Heath Sadlier, and we thought that we could perhaps fit about 100 stories onto five CDs which could be given to visitors arriving for the cup.

So we got started. We appointed two researchers, Karen Astwood and Chris Maclean, and we sat down with Diana and Jeremy Pope to draw up a list of suitable stories. We wanted tales of unusual personalities, of dramatic events, of striking natural features or distinctive economic activities. We also needed to ensure there was a good balance of cultures and time periods. Paora Ammundsen, Te Puni Kōkiri’s Rugby World Cup representative, was really helpful in giving us input from tāngata whenua. We aimed for a story about every half hour along the way. Well, it wasn’t hard finding suitable yarns, and both Karen and Chris did a great job doing the research. We discovered that Te Ara and our sister site, NZHistory, provided ideal already-researched material.

So far so good. I was still in my comfort zone – dealing with words on a page. Now came the hard part: we had to transfer written words into really interesting audio. I needed help. So first we searched Radio New Zealand Sound Archives for historical recordings that might add drama and veracity to the clips. Then I remembered Dave Armstrong, whom I had worked with at Te Papa and who has subsequently become a much-admired playwright. A bit of theatre was just what we needed. Dave immediately agreed to do the job, not only to write 110, 500–600-word scripts (about 55,000 words – which is the equivalent of a small book!) but he also agreed to find suitable actors to read the scripts or play the parts. Radio New Zealand agreed to do the recording of all 500 minutes – or more than 8 hours – of it.

Then problems began. The Christchurch earthquake hit and the Sound Archives building became inaccessible. The archives moved heaven and earth to help us, but we could only use sound recordings that had already been digitised. Forty-one of the stories have archives recordings on them, and there are some great ones. I love the famous recording of Jack Lovelock’s 1,500 metres win at the 1936 Olympics in the story about Timaru’s heroes.

Then we realised that preparing CDs was going to be hugely expensive and there would be major problems actually distributing them to incoming visitors. It also became clear, as the stories were prepared, that we had what was called in Rugby World Cup parlance ‘a legacy project’. The stories would be valuable for rugby tourists over the next six weeks, but they would also be valuable for any tourists, international or domestic, for the next six years. At this point I handed the problem to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s newly formed Web Team. Led by Matthew Oliver with the shrewd help of Heath Sadlier and Jamie Mackay, they suggested that web delivery was the best option, and Heath came up with the name: Roadside Stories.

But if the stories were going to go on the web as Youtube videos (which was just one of our planned delivery methods), then they’d need images to accompany the sounds. It was too late to get historical images, which would have created huge copyright problems and work. So I set off on the road, to take photos of the 110 places and to road-test the stories. It was a wonderful experience, if highly testing. I needed to average about a dozen places each day and had to take about a dozen interesting photos at each place. By the end of each day my eyes would ache with tiredness. Then, in the space of about three weeks, designer Dean Johnston, working to Heath’s directions, put the still images together into a slide show designed to illustrate the stories. He worked at a frantic pace!

Jamie also suggested that we could plot each place on Google Maps to assist people in finding them, so that was another time-consuming task. But we got it all done – hence the relief.

And now the excitement! When we now stand back and watch the stories, we realise that they are indeed much better, and more interesting and varied, than we had dared imagine them 18 months ago. The Web Team has done brilliant job finding ways to make them accessible as easily as possible:

• You can access them on Youtube.
• You can download MP3 files from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s corporate site.
• You can obtain them from iTunes.
• You can get an iPhone app which will provide the audio files and some images for every location along 12 routes.
• And you can get access to them through Google Maps.

So there is no excuse for missing out! I am certain you will enjoy them.

So thanks team for a wonderful effort. I hope you share my excitement at a job really well done.

If you’re looking for a place to start, here are some of my personal favourites:

• Tangiwai rail disaster
• Rocky Horror in Hamilton
• Taihape gumboot capital
• The underground glories of Waitomo
• Luxury spa at Rotorua
• Pahīatua’s little Poland
• Pāpāwai - the Māori capital
• Amberley hero
• The Moeraki boulders
• Invercargill’s inventors
• The Winton baby farmer.