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

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.

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.

Mayor Meng Foon at the East Coast launch

Before 130 enthusiastic locals, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Chris Finlayson last night launched the East Coast entry of Te Ara. This is the 21st and penultimate region in the Places theme to be launched. Every region has its own character, but the East Coast is without doubt the most bicultural area of the country.

As the entry shows, Māori constituted almost half (47.3%) of the population at the last census. It was also the place where Māori and James Cook first met; where a number of the founding waka, the Tākitimu, Horouta and Nukutaimemeha canoes, found landfall; and where Paikea landed on his whale. Monty Soutar agreed to write the entry because, as he explained last night, he was keen to ensure that the story of both peoples was adequately told. Monty had the ideal credentials for the job. He has whānau roots deep in the region, is a wonderful writer whose masterpiece is Nga Tama Toa on C Company of the 28 (Māori) Battalion, and has served as director of the Tairawahiti Museum and chief executive of the Ngāti Porou rūnanga. So, the story he tells evokes the Māori experience on the coast in all its richness. Among the highlights look at:

• a wonderful painting by Tony Lloyd of Hine Hakirirangi, sister of Pāoa the chief of the Horouta canoe.  She is said to have brought the kūmara to Aotearoa.
• a remarkable film of the posthumous presentation of the Victoria Cross to the parents of Te Moananui-a-Kiwa Ngārimu at Ruatōria in October 1943
• an interactive showing the marae in the Waiapu River valley
• a video for the hit song ‘Sensitive to a smile’, by reggae band Herbs, which was shot at Mangahānea marae near Ruatōria in 1987
• a film of Minister Finlayson signing the deed of settlement with Ngai Tāmanuhiri earlier this year.

There is also full acknowledgement of the contribution of Pākehā to the region such as:

• the ‘awe-inspiring sight’ of Douglas Cook’s Eastwoodhill arboretum
• Harry Barker, the longest serving mayor in New Zealand history
• Tom Heeney, who fought for the world’s heavyweight crown and is shown being welcomed by a huge crowd in Gisborne
• the novelist David Ballantyne represented by one of his East Coast novels, The Cunninghams
• and Murray Ball, one of the region’s most talented sons, who contributes a great cartoon.

The entry also includes a video of a waiata by the present mayor of Gisborne District, Meng Foon. Of Chinese origin, Mayor Meng learnt to speak Māori while working in his parents’ market garden alongside Ngāti Porou and Tūranganui-a-Kiwa labourers. To our delight the mayor sang the waiata last night at the launch. It is nice to realise that even in such a strongly bicultural place as the East Coast culture crosses all boundaries.

In April our latest theme, Social Connections, went live. After looking at the statistics for a couple of months, we can now tell you which of the 105 entries in the theme are the most popular. The results may surprise you, depress you, or simply intrigue you.

Skinhead and girlfriend – the most popular image from the most popular entry

Our most popular entry in this theme is Gangs. Now, there is no doubt that this is an excellent entry, which we spent much time over. For such a loaded subject we needed to draw on a range of skills and perspectives, so the entry was jointly written by noted criminologist Greg Newbold and expert on Māori society Rāwiri Taonui. When the entry arrived, it was checked and edited closely by Basil Keane, Te Ara’s Māori editor, and our in-house specialist on crime, Carl Walrond. Fierce arguments ensued. We tried to get the balance right between, as the blurb says, presenting gangs as ‘products of poor and troubled backgrounds looking for friendship and fun, or as criminal organisations associated with drug running, violence and crime’. Then we sent the entry off to some former gang members to get the facts right. So, it is a good entry, well worked over and brilliantly illustrated – look at the map of gangs, the interactive on gang insignia, and the great photo of Thea Muldoon and Black Power.

Yet I doubt if the entry’s quality is the only reason for its popularity. An indication of this is that the third most popular entry is Violent crime, also written by Greg. It deals with murders, assault and rape. Perhaps it is simply that people are drawn to sensationalism. As that entry says: ‘Murders, assaults and rapes dominate newspaper headlines, attract television news viewers, and ignite public debate about harsher sentences for offenders and better support for victims of crime.’ Or is it that people have come looking for answers to deep-seated social problems? Our fourth most popular entry is on Mental health services.

If some of our users are just pursuing sensationalism, others have quite different interests. A particularly strong strand are those who are interested in finding out about the history of women’s experience. Others are interested in the history of families over time and other social-history subjects. Among the top eight we find:

• Megan Cook’s magisterial survey of the Women’s movement
• Kerryn Pollock’s fascinating study of Pregnancy, birth and baby care
• Rosemary Du Plessis and Ian Pool’s brilliant overview, Families – a history
• Jan Jordan’s pioneering study of Sex work and the battle to legalise prostitution.

Another significant group of users are interested in things Māori, and especially the relationships between Pākehā and Māori. The most popular Māori entry is Basil Keane’s informed survey of traditional Māori religion, Ngā karakia a te Māori – traditional Māori religion. Also in the top 12 are Māori–Pākehā relations, Missions and missionaries, Ethnic inequalities and Ethnic and religious intolerance.

Finally, number 13 on the popularity stakes is the entry on Dental care. Do people enjoy re-living their memories of the ‘murderhouse‘, or is there some other reason for its popularity? I leave you to speculate as you enjoy our chart-toppers.