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

Late last year we published our first iBook and it’s available (for free) here in the iTunes store. It’s a small step for us but one that represents our current attempts to explore and experiment with new forms of digital publishing beyond our (traditional?) websites.

The cover of our Roadside Stories iBook

The content we used for this iBook, which is able to include images and multimedia as well as just text, was taken from our series of stories about New Zealand, Roadside Stories. These were produced as part of our contribution to the Rugby World Cup in 2011, and feature 140 stories from along the main highways up and down the country. In a similarly experimental vein, the Roadside Stories series was the first time we really thought about content as having a life that wasn’t restricted to one website. Instead we created the content and then found as many places as possible to publish it.

In creating the Roadside Stories, we started with stories and created the audio, then added images to create YouTube videos, then mapped it all to Google Maps as well as creating an iPhone app (and later an Android app) using MyTours. And only then did we start embedding the videos onto websites. It looks a bit like this:

What we did with Roadside Stories

From there it became a fairly straightforward matter to create an iBook using a couple of the Roadside Stories tours, namely the routes from Christchurch to Invercargill and then Invercargill to Queenstown. The iBook combines audio of the stories with short introductory text and maps, as well as a full slide show of images. To round it out we’ve included additional text (lifted from Te Ara and NZHistory) and links to our websites for more information about the places.

Contents page for the Christchurch-to-Invercargill tour

The Mount Cook story

Again, we’re starting to see our Manatū Taonga – Ministry for Culture and Heritage websites as a collection of content in itself, rather than separate silos, and as a rich source that can be recombined in new forms and formats. More than that, we’re hoping to extend that thinking to include a much wider range of sites from across New Zealand’s rich and varied online cultural world.

So where to next? The iBook is an experiment and we’d love your feedback on it and thoughts on whether this is the sort of content and format that you’re interested in seeing more of. We’ve included a link to a survey at the end of the book, or you can leave a comment here.

Some readers will question why we produced an iBook that can only be read on an iPad, and it’s a fair question. It’s a pragmatic approach really: iAuthor, the software that produces iBooks, made it simple to produce something beautiful.

We’re eagerly awaiting developments with the platform-neutral epub format as it starts to support more of the features that appear in iBooks, and will be realeasing a few experimental ebooks soon. In the meantime, those of you with an iPad, have a play with the results of our foray into the world of ebooks, iBooks, digital books – call them what you will – and let us know what you think.

‘What the hell is that?!’ Sean said, looking from his vantage point on the couch towards the ocean.

The ocean was just across the road from the Paekakariki holiday cottage we’d booked for Wellington Anniversary weekend. I’d just come in from outside. It was getting dusky, and the breeze was getting cold, but before I closed the door on the sound of the sea I wanted to spend a bit more time on the deck, watching the waves. But somehow I’d missed it.

‘There was a giant black fin sticking out of the sea,’ he said.

We went outside and before too long we saw another fin, and then a couple more, breaking the surface of the water. Orcas! Judging by the cars that started arriving, other people had noticed them too and were phoning all their friends.

We were treated to quite a show as at least four orcas (it was hard to tell how many, as they kept disappearing and reappearing) meandered their way up the coast towards Raumati. Hopeful of another look, we followed them up the beach, but they were gone. All I had to prove we saw them was a rather bad picture I took on my phone.

Two orca fins appearing above the waves

A close up, in case you didn't believe me

It was a strange week for large sea mammals on the Kapiti Coast – a few days before a 15-metre-long sperm whale had stranded and died on Paraparaumu Beach. I’m not sure whether orcas are commonly found around this area, though according to Te Ara (which I, of course, consulted to enrich my paltry knowledge about orcas) 15 stranded at Paraparumu in 1955. Fortunately the ones I saw didn’t suffer that same fate.

When I told a friend about seeing the orcas, she was surprised as she was used to seeing them off the Hawke’s Bay coast during childhood. Apparently, again according to Te Ara, you are ‘most likely to see them are off the Bay of Plenty, East Cape and Hawke’s Bay regions in June, and again from October to December.’ But obviously that isn’t their exclusive domain. In fact three separate groups of orcas live around New Zealand: one off the North Island, one off the South Island and a third group that spends its time in both regions.

A much better photo of an orca from the Orca Research Trust

Back in the day (i.e. my childhood) orcas were always called ‘killer whales’. That’s discouraged now because not only are they not killers – well not of humans (there haven’t been any reports of orcas attacking humans), though they do kill and eat a great many other creatures – they are not even whales. They actually belong to the dolphin family. They’re the biggest dolphin though, and are of a similar size to the smaller whales. In this footage of an orca pod swimming beside a ship, it’s easy to see their dolphinishness (which should be a word, even if it isn’t) as they glide up and down through the waves.

Otago Central Rail Trail between Wedderburn and Ranfurly

Jock wasn’t the only Te Ara staffer to spend some of his Christmas break on the seat of a bicycle. I spent a few days enjoying the Otago Central Rail Trail.

I ride less than Jock, but my relationship with the bicycle is somewhat different from his. I’ve always enjoyed cycling. As soon as I was old enough to ride on the roads, I rode to school pretty much every day, regardless of the weather. The trip to primary school was under a kilometre, college was about two-and-a-half kilometres; but I wasn’t allowed to ride to intermediate as it was deemed too far (and there was a free bus).

I would also ride for pleasure in the holidays and, when I got my 12-speed, would think nothing of the 40-kilometre round trip to Days Bay, or a similarly long ride someplace else (or noplace else if, I felt like it). When I got my first mountain bike I was happy to take that for a ride in the hills – my favourite ride (not that I’ve done it for a while) is up to the Brooklyn wind turbine then down to Red Rocks and back home via Island Bay.

The Otago Central Rail Trail had long been in my plans and when the opportunity arose to do it this year I wasn’t going to turn it down. Our group based ourselves in Naseby which isn’t actually on the rail trail and involved lots of shuttling various vehicles to and from the day’s start and end points. But it meant we were flexible to do the track however we wanted, deciding which legs to do based on the weather, energy levels etc.

Trail sign at Wedderburn

The first day was a slow start, only a short stretch as a warm up, mainly downhill - Wedderburn to Kokonga, 31.5 kilometres. However, at about the halfway point of leg one we met a rain storm. I got to Ranfurly without getting too wet but as the rain settled in, and with cars at Wedderburn and Kokonga I realised someone (i.e. me) would have to ride back to Wedderburn in order to rescue the others from the weather.

The next day we woke to snow!!

Snow at Naseby. In summer.

We decided to do the picturesque leg from Wedderburn to Ōmakau, 41.1 kilometres. It was a little chilly and we had a constant headwind, breeze really, but it was a pleasant enough ride and the scenery was at times spectacular. We also got to see the Poolburn viaduct and tunnels and the older tunnellers’ camp.

45° south sign west of Wedderburn

A close-up of the sign

Poolburn viaduct

The next day was Kokonga to Middlemarch (the traditional finishing point of the trail), 41.9 kilometres. This included a lovely little trip along a gorge of the Taieri River, and through Hyde, past the site of the Hyde rail disaster and the Hyde rail disaster memorial. Fortunately we all managed an incident free ride.

Hyde rail disaster memorial

Arriving in Middlemarch

Day four was Ōmakau to Clyde (the traditional starting point of the trail), 37.2 kilometres. It was the hottest day, reaching 35 degrees in Alexandra, though it felt much hotter than that on the exposed track coming into Clyde. I just love the parched, rocky landscape around that part of the country, and even the intense heat wasn’t enough to dampen my enjoyment of it.

'The parched, rocky landscape': hills around Chatto Creek and Galloway

As the only one in the group not to have done the trail before, I did the last day on my own, just so I could say I completed the whole thing. Ranfurly to Tiroiti, 25.5 kilometres. While I only needed to stop at Kokonga, I wanted to revisit the lovely little Taieri River gorge again. And a good thing too as the Ranfurly to Kokonga stretch is the dullest stretch, not helped by the howling headwind I had, so that last bit of gorgeous scenery made me happy.

The little Taieri River gorge (which I’m not sure has an actual name) on the way to Tiroiti

The track is classed as easy, and it is, with those nice steady gradients that trains needed to tackle hills. And every day we took it easy, with regular stops, long lunches and just enjoying the surrounds. We could have done most of it in half the time, but we weren’t in any rush and it was a nice way to do it. And with the long southern summer days we also had time to do a bit of exploring farther afield on the way home to Naseby.

The trail between Ranfurly and Kokonga, showing one of the little info huts (though I’m not entirely sure if this one had anything in it)

All along the trail are huts containing historical information about the area you’re passing through, not that I bothered much with that, I was just having fun being on the bike again. So much so that when we visited Hanmer Springs a few days later I forewent a trip to the hot pools with the group for a ride up Jacks Pass on the bike. It was a stupid idea, but that’s another story…

In Te Ara, as in life, one thing leads to another, and the outcome is pleasantly uncertain.

A friend told me recently that a second-hand bookshop in town was selling the sheet music for a song called ‘Puhihuia’. He thought I’d be interested because I’d been researching a Māori legend about a pair of lovers named Ponga and Puhihuia. I went to the shop and bought the song for 20 bucks. That seemed pretty good for eight pages of sheet music from the 1940s, with the cover printed in a marvellously tacky typeface incorporating Māori designs.

The cover of the sheet music for 'Puhihuia'

The song had a pretty tune and lyrics that, like our national anthem, could be sung in either Māori or English. These showed me that it was indeed based on the legend I was interested in. The story had been collected (some say invented) in the early 19th century by the pioneering, and somewhat dodgy, ethnologist John White. He had grown up in the Hokianga from 1835 and spoke fluent Māori.

The introduction to 'Puhihuia'

Both the music and the lyrics were attributed to Mari Hamutana, a musician I’d never heard of. A bit of internet searching revealed that the name was a pseudonym for a Pākehā composer named Ruby King. She had been brought up in the King Country, the daughter of a schoolteacher, in the 1880s and, like John White, learned to speak Māori fluently. She wrote many songs in Māori and English, and some were broadcast on New Zealand radio. ‘Puhihuia’, her only published song, was also broadcast by the BBC in London in 1937. A Miss Eileen Driscoll of Wellington sang several Māori songs, including ‘Puhihuia’, on programmes beamed to Australia and Shanghai.

The sheet music for 'Puhihuia'

That’s about as far as I’ve got with this bit of pure and unplanned research, but if anyone can add more information on either this song or its composer, I’d be interested to hear it. In the meantime I’m thinking of passing ‘Puhihuia’ on to the ukulele orchestra that’s been formed here at work, in case they want to add this song to their repertoire.

Can't get to Paris? No matter, you can still wander around the Musée d’Orsay. There's also the bonus of no tourists standing in front of you.

Where do you get your kicks – gazing intently at a beautiful object in a glass case, or exploring it and manipulating it on a computer screen? Over the last two weeks I have enjoyed two stimulating conferences which, taken together, have debated this question.

As Marguerite Hill has told us in her blog, the first conference, Material Histories: Antipodean Perspectives, revelled in the sanctity and meaning of the object. Kirstie Ross and Kate Hunter explained that while the study of letters and diaries has told us much about the experience of the First World War, objects provide an emotional immediacy that is at a different level. Pieces of lace sent home to a love by a soldier on the Western Front, or Dorothy Broad’s woollen doll made in the likeness of her fiancé speak of relationships between battlefield and home in an intense way. Speaker after speaker at Material Histories suggested that no image could ever do full justice to the actual object. People would always come to visit museums to see such objects. The virtual world of the museum website could never be an adequate replacement.

At the National Digital Forum, Vikram Kumar of InternetNZ took up the debate from the very start. He began by playing a clip from a TED talk by Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Campbell spoke of his love of being a curator working with fine objects. He suggested that by standing in a hall of beautiful things from 14 centuries of Islamic culture you could begin to understand that culture. Nothing could replicate the authenticity of such objects. This, said Kumar, was the challenge of those who worked on the web.

The answer came back fulsomely in subsequent sessions. The first to tackle the question was Piotr Adamczyk from the Google Art Project. His initial foray was not reassuring. He showed what happens if you collect together tiny thumbnails of thousands of art works into an abstract pattern. When he applied this to covers of Time magazine arranged chronologically the result was bands of colour which raised intriguing questions about why dark colours dominated at certain periods. But the effect was to obscure, not illuminate, particular objects. Then he went to the other end of the scale and, using the amazing power of 7 billion pixels, he showed what an object might look like really close. Suddenly you saw things in the art works that you could never possibly have seen by just looking at them on a wall. In a sense, the Google Art Project was creating new works. And you could put together your own exhibition from the over 30,000 paintings on the site, and suggest new connections and influences. Using Google Street View (or rather, in this case ‘Museum View‘, you can even wander into a gallery and replicate the museum experience.

Then Tim Sherrat and Chris McDowell showed how by harvesting data from a range of institutions, images about people, place, events, or even objects, could take on so much more meaning. Their context could be explored in all its richness. Questions could be asked and answered which you could not do by the simple act of contemplation in front of a museum case.

Sarah Barnes from Sydney took the debate further. Her focus was on bringing particular places to life. Using digital technology, she adorns those locations with sounds and images from the past projected in huge scale onto outdoor walls. She showed as an example the story of an inner-city Sydney hotel, the Australia, with a project called Last Drinks. For Sarah, the digital resources of the internet were crucial and added immense richness, but, ironically, they only had power and pertinence because they were experienced at the actual place where the past events happened. The digital, in other words, was made meaningful by the real.

Those who worked in museums remained uncertain. At the end of the day Aaron Cope from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum asked us all ‘Is the building an expensive perk?’. He questioned the view that things touched by human hands have magical powers and almost suggested that it was a self-protective dogma of the old-time curator.

I have to say that I ended up with Sarah Barnes. It is always hugely exciting to go to Waitangi and see the very place where the treaty was signed, or stare at the actual signatures on the treaty itself. At such moments history does indeed live. But afterwards I like to go back and explore on the web, learn what the ink on the treaty would look like at 4,000 pixels or find out about the full human context which surrounded the event.

Where do you stand – virtual or real, or a bit of both?