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

Local people – a hunt at Ōmarunui, in Hawke's Bay

Should the authors of Te Ara’s Places entries be locals?

Out of the 14 places entries up on the site so far, seven were written by people who were from that region, and seven by in-house writers with connections elsewhere. Having written the recently launched Hawke’s Bay entry from my desk in Wellington (with my roots in the rural settlement of Tauwhare near the Waikato town of Cambridge), this was something I often thought about. (An entry on Waikato is coming to Te Ara, via my colleague and former Hamiltonian Nancy Swarbrick, in 2010.)

One of the times authorship is discussed publicly is when these entries are launched. People – usually locals – often want to know if the author is also local. This is to be expected. Place informs an individual or community’s identity, and a strong attachment to birthplace or home town (whether long-standing or adopted) often follows. When something is written about your place you take notice, and perhaps go through the text with your fine-toothed comb in a way you might not if you went to Te Ara for a quick account of a cicada’s lifecycle or the seasonal stars in the night sky.

Obviously I concluded that an author didn’t have to be a local – if I hadn’t it would have been hard for me to write the thing. Rather, I decided that the most important requirements were those crucial to writing any Te Ara entry: thorough research, careful identification and analysis of the relevant issues, sensitive treatment of tricky or controversial topics, and rigorous in-house peer review further down the track. Specific to writing a good Places entry is contact with local people for information, getting good advice and reviews of the draft text, and paying the region a good, investigative visit.

It’s true that it would be very useful to have the existing knowledge of a local, but this can be accrued during the research process. The fact is, nobody – local or otherwise – can know all there is to know about a place without doing a lot of research. Though I spent the first 18 years of my life in Waikato, and go back regularly enough to retain my native status, I’d need to do the same amount of research as a non-local before I could write about it properly. And, while outsiders are often seen to be more impartial, a good local writer will not take sides or shy away from the tricky issues that often have to be written about in Places entries.

I don’t think that local status can be the final arbiter of whether a Places entry is authoritative. We’re not that parochial, are we? It’s the writing and the underlying research that counts. Local status is more like the icing on an already rich cake – but only if it’s made out of the right ingredients.

What do you think?

Yesterday the Te Ara site moved to the open-source Drupal content management platform and made a number of relatively minor changes to the site navigation.

Of course quite a few things went wrong yesterday morning, but the site is now (mostly) performing better than it used to and it offers us so many possibilities that, though a tad exhausted at this point, we’re looking happily towards the future. Kudos to HeadFirst, our developers, who not only migrated the entire 30,000 pages but also gave us a new authoring system and some Easter Eggs too. Hallelujah! And to have a search engine that actually returns relevant results in a logical order is almost a religious experience for some, including the General Editor. It’s faster and more accurate than our old one. (For them as wants to know, the engine is Sphinx, also open-source.)

The site is mostly as it was (if it ain’t broke …) but here are some of the differences that you might notice:

URLs to pages have been simplified and now appear in the form

http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/story-name (or /mi/ for the Māori interface)

A comprehensive redirection is in place and any bookmarks shouldn’t break, but please update them. Links deeper than a story (entry) page may not be resolved correctly but our error page gives a number of helpful suggestions.

Other changes include:

• You can now browse Te Ara’s contents (groupled (ha ha) in a variety of ways) on any page by clicking on the ‘Browse Te Ara’ command at the very top every page.
• The Short Story icon and link has been consistently positioned on all pages, to the right of the title.
• The Short Story has a new ‘lightbox‘ treatment.
• Biography links (to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website) appear at the foot of the story pages, and the Biographies Gallery has been removed.
• To move to the text from an image or other media item, click the ‘Back to story’ button.
• Images or media which are grouped together have improved internal navigation (thumbnails appear above the main image).
• Further Sources pages have been placed within the story navigation.
• Related Stories are now managed through an automated process based on key words on the page. This is still subject to refinement, and we’ve signalled the lack of human intervention in the process by labelling the feature ‘You may be interested in…’ No guarantees, but there may be a serendipity…

If any of the navigation is unclear, try reading through our ‘How to use Te Ara’ page.

There have also been a number of small cosmetic changes to improve the look of the site. We’d be pleased to have your reactions to the changes. Leave a comment below.

One of the images to look forward to in our Hawke's Bay Flickr exhibition

Our Flickr work has taken us to many places – with our Hawke’s Bay entry nearly complete and launching this week (Thursday), we are now starting to work on the Taranaki entry.

We love people contributing their images, and we’re now looking for images of Taranaki. It doesn’t matter what it is, we want to see it. Some possibilities are photos of people, places, towns, landscapes, beaches, animals, farms or buildings.

We’ll use images we source from Flickr either in the main entry or a Flickr exhibition, such as this one we created for Otago. Our exhibitions use a Flash slideshow called Pictobrowser to pull the Flickr images into the entry. It has been a helpful tool in allowing us to showcase other images of the regions that we haven’t been able to use in the entries.

So far we have three very successful exhibitions – for the West Coast, Southland and Otago. Hawke’s Bay will be up very soon, and our Hawke’s Bay exhibition pool will give you a taste of what’s to come in the exhibition!

We now have over 200 Flickr contacts who contribute regularly. We hope you’ll join us and start adding images to our pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/teara/.

A family pyramid

What connects us to those we love? What words do we use for these connections – aroha, alofa, love, agapē, liefde, érōs, amour? How do we become lovers, welcome the arrival of babies and juggle paid work, parenting and community activities? Does gender make a difference and, if so, how? What spiritual beliefs and practices are important when we farewell those we love, and how are burial practices changing?

Over the next year Te Ara will develop a new set of entries on ‘social connections’. New material is being written on whānau/families, love, courtship, marriage, civil unions, sexuality, birthing practices, adoption, contraception, childhood, gay and lesbian lives, ageing, funerals and inheritance. Entries on Māori love stories, Mills & Boon romances, dance floor courtship, and internet dating will be found alongside information about state regulation of marriage/civil unions, separation and divorce.

New migrant family

People connect not only as lovers, parents and children, but also as Māori and Pākehā, Samoan and Chinese, Catholic and Protestant, Morman and Buddhist. Aotearoa New Zealand is a place where for hundreds of years tangata whenua have been interacting with waves of new settlers. Te Ara will look at connections between Māori and non-Māori, between established settlers and newcomers, and how refugees and recent migrants build new community organisations. Racism and attempts to establish connections across difference will also feature in the social connections theme.

Relationships with others make us what we are as individuals and as a nation, but they can also be painful and damaging. So there will also be entries on family violence, the neglect and abuse of children, and crimes such as aggravated robbery and assault. How have voluntary organisations, churches, communities and the state responded to the challenges of abuse, neglect, poverty, disabilities, inequality and violence? What has been the response of the state? What public debate has occurred and how has it changed over time?

For many people religion/spirituality is central to their connectedness to Atua/God/Yahweh/Allah, to people, to other living things and the environment. How has religion and spirituality connected people and what tensions and conflicts have been associated with religious difference? What was the impact of missionary activity on Māori and what is the current place of Māori within established Christian churches? How do religious institutions respond to connections and differences among those in their communities? Contributors to Te Ara are currently writing entries that look at some answers to these questions.

The Claris family in 1912

Health and well-being also depend on social connections – on our relationships with family members, others in our communities and health practitioners. Te Ara will look at the interactions between providers and users of health services, at relationships among health professionals (like doctors and midwives) and new health initiatives like marae-based healthcare.

The web is a key way in which people now connect. And you can connect to Te Ara by sending us your stories about whānau/family, community organisations/clubs/societies, religious activities or health groups. Do you have photos of family events, balls and dances, church camps, public meetings, protests or community activities that we could use? Would you like to share your account of what it was like to set up a new community organisation?

Please go to http://www.mch.govt.nz/projects/web/teara/my-story.html if you have a story you would like to contribute, or join our Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/teara/ if you have images you’d like to contribute.

We are keen to receive material between 1 August 2009 and 1 March 2010.

And only connect!

Some of my family history – the gravestone of John and Priscilla Yeatman

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Family history sells. Websites designed to help you track your rellies or discover your Highland origins net millions in revenue each year. New Zealanders have embraced the search for their family’s past. We do the tours of the castles overseas; we walk the little lanes where ‘our settlers’ lived. We’ve got on board the genealogical bandwagon with a vengeance.

A couple of weeks ago I spent my sabbatical uncovering ways the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB) can best carry out birth, death and marriage research for our newest biographies. We’ve discovered that the hardest part is bypassing privacy restrictions on recently living people – and those who fit within our current area of research and interest are people who died in the last decade or so. But online resources, such as the website of the Public Record Office in the United Kingdom, can now make our search easier

Every week we get numerous enquiries from genealogists who want to make use of our biographical database. Researchers compiled the database at the time the first DNZB biographies were written. Today it’s still a great source of background information on about 13,000 New Zealanders.

The National Library of New Zealand runs a family history centre, which gives access to a treasure trove of tools to help you uncover your roots. During my stint there, I was surrounded by other enthusiasts.

Using computerised databases has supplanted spending hours in front of the microfiche reader; but many of the fiche records are still valuable. At the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Family History Centre in Hataitai, Wellington, I put the fiche to a test. I knew my great-great-great grandfather James Spence had got off a ship from Glasgow at Port Chalmers, Otago, in 1868. Scottish Parochial Registers, held on microfiche, quickly put together a picture of James’s parents and grandparents. They conveniently hadn’t moved far from the village outside Glasgow that they and their antecedents had lived in for about the previous 300 years. Archives New Zealand also holds a wealth of material for those who want to track the ships their Anglo rellies arrived on. I could now see why family historians get addicted.

You’ll often hear older Pākehā New Zealanders refer to themselves as Scottish, Irish or French. They are, of course, referring to their family history. I’ve always found this tricky – I consider myself a Kiwi; I was born here and this place is my heritage. I know I’ve got a bunch of long-dead relatives who were born in Glasgow and Stoke Wake and Hull and Jersey and Swansea, but I don’t feel one bit Scottish, Welsh or English.

Though recently I found that two of my English relatives, John and Priscilla Yeatman – who arrived here in 1875 under the Vogel scheme for assisted immigrants – are buried at Greendale Public Cemetery near Darfield in mid-Canterbury. I was in Christchurch last weekend, and my Kiwiness didn’t stop me making a little visit to pay my respects.