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

Geotagging can help you find gannets

Nothing new. Just an idea to retrospectively trawl through our back catalogue and plug in some numbers (or metadata to you geeks).

Te Ara has a lot of still and moving images. Many are of a specific location, and in most the date of the photograph (or film) is known as well. If we gave all these GPS coordinates and dates, then applications such as a layer in Google Earth, or something our clever designers might build, could pull out information.

You can see this in action on Flickr and Google Maps, but their images have little context or historical information. If we were to geotag the resources on Te Ara, the point of difference would be historical images plus credible caption information. Resources could be tagged to something as large as a country, or as small as a city block – as Adrian Holovaty showed us with his EveryBlock presentation at Webstock 09.

While it is probably the Places entries that lend themselves best to this approach, there are plenty of images in other entries that are location-specific. They could be categorised so that art buffs get paintings, history types get history, natural historians get gannets, and random types get random.  You could also filter by black and white, colour, film, paintings, sketches, maps etc. These could also be displayed as tick boxes in an interactive map of a region. If images were dated, you could also filter for particular years.

For example: You are a tourist. Through an application on your mobile phone you have registered as a history geek. Driving along near Tuapeka toward Central Otago, your iPhone tells you that Indian Edward Peters was probably the first discoverer of gold in Otago. When you arrive in Arrowtown it tells you that residents of nearby Macetown had a liberal approach to alcohol. Or, another example, you’re interested in art, and you’re driving on the south coast of Wairarapa. Your phone shows you Kupe’s Sail just in time for you to compare it to the real one.

One problem for geotagging would be identifying the coordinates for many photos – but near enough is good enough. For example, for Edward Peters you could just tag it to a one-kilometre radius of Tuapeka, and a mobile would pick it up within one kilometre of Tuapeka.

It would require a lot of work – someone would need to go through the images and select which ones to use, then plug in the date, latitude and longitude, and categories. But then applications could pull in the data and spit it out in all sorts of new and exciting ways.

Continuing our series of posts about how Te Ara comes into being, one of our in-house writers writes about writing.

Telling people you are a writer sounds pretentious so I tell them I’m a writer/researcher, which just confuses them. Being a writer for Te Ara involves three main jobs:

• writing (obviously)
• checking
• captioning.

Writing/researching

In The Settled Landscape theme I have written entries on things like rural workers and hunting.  Writing an entry involves researching and then condensing information into plain English pages of around 500 words. The style must be concise and hopefully interesting.

Checking

Entries written by external experts are assigned to in-house writers to check. That is make sure that facts (dates, figures etc) are correct, and that the entry is balanced in terms of the sources that it draws upon.  It can be difficult for external writers as they are not always aware of the scope of their entry. They sometimes stray into areas covered by other Te Ara entries, so in many cases some structural editing is needed.

Writers also write captions for these entries (see below). In The Settled Landscape I have checked entries on topics such as hops, hemp and tobacco and rural clothing.

Fisherman with chiselled jaw

Captioning

Writing captions to go with the pictures, videos and other resources that accompany each entry on Te Ara is another task for writers. The word count in captions can be almost as high as the word count of the main entry text, so it is a big part of the job. Some images have plenty of background information with them, but sometimes the image has nothing - not even where or when the image was taken. These often end up having shortish captions! My favourite image in The Settled Landscape is the chiselled jaw of the chap in the picture on the left – he graces a poster advertising fishing for the government tourist department, which is in the Freshwater fishing entry.

On to the editors

All text (entries and captions) go from writers to copy editors, who edit for grammatical errors, readability etc. They remove jargon, repetition, over-writing, flowery language, grand-standing, axe-grinding, barrow-pushing, preaching and scores of other writers’ crimes. They are the readers’ advocates, who get the copy ready for publishing to the web.

Hermit's cave in the Silver Peaks

Ross Collins has enlarged a natural crevasse in the rocks at Seatoun and attracted considerable media attention as a caveman. He is in good company. In the 1880s and 1890s William Pearsee lived in a cave around Wellington’s south coast and was known as ‘the Hermit of Island Bay’. He was even more famous and Wellingtonians of that time dragged visitors to the city to see him. He liked to keep up with Parliament’s dealings and welcomed newspapers.  Artist Petrus van der Velden even painted him.

What causes a man to live alone? Solitude? A beautiful environement? The reasons vary and often it is just for a part of their lives. Richard Henry lived alone on Resolution Island as a caretaker of the kākāpō – he originally chose to live on the shores of Lake Te Anau when he was jilted by a woman.  In the 1950s Ross Adamson spent three years in caves in the Silver Peaks – the hills behind Dunedin. He hid from police manhunts.  He had an unpaid debt, had stolen a rifle and was picking off sheep from the backblocks. He even had a cave-mate – a pet wild pig.  Eventually he came out, the court fined him, and he later married. Beansprout in south Westland used to live alone at the mouth of the Gorge River but has had a wife and family for over a decade. In the great depression journalist Fred Miller lived in a cave on the Clutha River mining gold from the river beaches. He got lonely and soon shipped in his wife and three-year-old daughter.
Other famous New Zealand hermits include Donald Sutherland, the ‘Hermit of Milford Sound’; and Carl Björk, the ‘Hermit of Preservation Inlet’.  They were surprisingly sociable. Sutherland married and Björk welcomed visitors lubricating them with his home made ‘parsnippy wine’.

The media loves a good recluse even if it is an animal. Shrek was beloved – he even had his own cave. Books were written about him. He was shorn on an iceberg. Hermit or feral sheep are quite common - termed ‘woollies‘, hunters target them.

Dubbing men like Ross hermits does not seem accurate - they are just living differently. But society likes labels. After the gold rushes of the 1870s diggers who lived alone in shacks were called  ’hatters’ – if they had nothing else they would pan gold in their hats.

The hermit crab makes a home for itself out of a natural shelter – just like Ross Collins. The crab, like most of these men, knows a good place to live when they see it.

The mysterious Kaimanawa wall

I recently attended an interesting science communicators conference in Dunedin. At coffee, someone told me that often people he met at barbeques held that knowing things (or wanting to find out about things) was bad. It’s a belief you occasionally come across. At school, those who get good marks are derided as girly swots, and academics are often accused of living in ivory towers (sometimes with justification).

His example was of someone (at a barbeque) who told him that thunder kills goose eggs. Being a scientist, he was intrigued and asked for an explanation of how this process might work. It was not forthcoming and it seemed that none was necessary, as she knew from experience that this was so.

Someone commented that this was the tall-poppy syndrome. But that’s not quite it – that’s about building people up only to cut them down. This was about not being open minded, or, taking it a step further, not even being curious about the world. It was about belief.

Science is about humility (though scientists themselves are not always humble): if you don’t know how something works (which is the most likely case scenario) you use systematic methods to see if you can find out. Scientists are often more interested in telling you what they don’t know than what they do.

It seems to me that the goose egg believer is on the road to Roswell or perhaps the Kaimanawa Wall. While thunder probably does not kill goose eggs, just as lights in the sky are probably not aliens, they certainly are intriguing explanations. Maybe that’s what mystics are on about – for some, the world is much more interesting if they choose to believe in grand conspiracy theories.

Alternate views of reality flourish on the web, as seen in the case of the Kaimanawa Wall and the umpteen pre-Māori civilisations in New Zealand. (This phenomena of choosing the outlandish over the logical was recently parodied in a South Park episode.)

Maybe the mystics should lower the cone of silence over the goose nests in thunderstorms?

At work in a radiocarbon-dating laboratory

A woman’s skull, found in Wairarapa in 2004, has been carbon dated as being 296 years old – plus or minus 34 years. Forensic scientists can tell from a skull’s morphology whether or not it was a Māori skull and whether it was a man or a woman, and the skull wasn’t that of a Māori.

This challenges New Zealand history, as there were no white settlers (male or female) here then. The first documented white women (Catherine Hagerty and Charlotte Badger, two escaped convicts from New South Wales) are thought to have arrived in 1806.

If the carbon dates and the forensic interpretation of the skull form are accurate, then a non-Māori woman, probably a European, was alive in Wairarapa around 1678–1746. This was 36–104 years after Abel Tasman sighted New Zealand in 1642 (he never landed) and at least 23 years before Cook’s first voyage in 1769!

So how can this be explained? Again assuming that the carbon dates and forensic interpretation are correct – is it possible that a Dutch (or some other) ship reached New Zealand between Tasman and Cook? The Dutch knew of New Zealand from Tasman, but, although they planned a follow-up voyage in 1643, this never occurred. The arrival of a ship between Tasman and Cook is of course pure speculation.

In terms of the recent carbon dating, it is only one skull and there are assumptions made with any analysis – that is why scientists couch their findings with words like ‘possibly a European female’ and ‘was probably Caucasian’.