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

Did you know that when New Zealand’s first bank note was issued in 1934 it included a portrait of the Māori king, Tāwhiao, because no one could produce a suitable image of George V? Or that when the nation’s coat of arms was redesigned in 1956 Attorney General John Marshall sent it back to the designers with instructions to make the figure of Zealandia look more like the Hollywood star Grace Kelly?

These are just two of the fascinating stories to be found in Te Ara’s seventh major release, Government and Nation, which was launched by His Excellency Lt Gen The Rt Hon Sir Jerry Mateparae, governor general, before an appreciative audience of 200 at Parliament last night. The theme editors for the new section were Stephen Levine and Nigel Roberts, distinguished political scientists from Victoria University of Wellington. They have worked for two-and-a-half years planning and overseeing the content. Contributors include a former prime minister, a former Supreme Court judge, a former clerk of the House of Representatives, and a score of political scientists, historians and Māori academics from the country’s top universities.

The governor general launching Government and Nation

There are 98 entries, about 250,000 words and more than 2,000 images in Government and Nation. The material is organised in nine sub-themes:

• Education, which provides an overview of that sector from pre-school to tertiary education.
• Institutions of Government, which covers the central institutions that keep the state functioning, such as Parliament, cabinet, and governors general. I particularly enjoyed the entry on premiers and prime ministers, which includes Gordon Coates as a stained glass window, Mickey Savage as a piece of embroidery and Norman Kirk as a pop song (‘Big Norm’).
• Legal System includes in the Police entry a delightful film about the country’s first police dog, Miska.
• Nationhood and Identity is a very rich set of entries ranging from coins and postage stamps to public holidays and the honours system. Make sure you don’t miss the national anthem performed in all three of New Zealand’s official languages.
• New Zealand and the World has entries on the country’s relations with countries and regions including the United States, the Pacific, Asia and Antarctica. A fascinating resource can be found in the Australia and New Zealand entry, where we see how the two countries solved their problem about claiming Phar Lap, by distributing the horse’s body parts across the Tasman.
• Political Participation is a big group of 17 entries about political parties and the operation of democracy. Elections and campaigns includes a wonderful interactive that presents the political history of New Zealand in a series of diagrams covering every election since 1890. And don’t ignore the television clip about the famous ‘worm’.
• State Sector and Policy provides clear introductions to how the boffins in government really work. It even explains clearly in another fine diagram how the electricity sector operates – particularly useful if, like me, you have always been bewildered by its structure.
• Te Tiriti – the Treaty offers comprehensive coverage of the Treaty of Waitangi and its institutional children such as the Waitangi Tribunal.
• War and Defence is another big group of 17 entries, which is a testament to the significance of war to this land. There are magnificent overviews of the New Zealand wars, First World War and Second World War and some powerful film clips, ranging from excerpts from Jamie Belich’s New Zealand wars television series to our own short film about George Bollinger.

Government and Nation is perhaps Te Ara’s most significant section yet, since it explores the very essence of who we are as a nation. We hope you enjoy it, learn heaps about this country and have a few laughs along the way.

The New Zealand Official Yearbook had infographics before they were trendy

Those of us who scurry around trying to find out about New Zealand’s past have long depended on the official yearbooks appearing most years since 1893. The yearbooks, produced by the Department of Statistics (as Statistics New Zealand used to be known), were most obviously a collation of statistics about the economy and society of this country. If you wanted to know how many letters had been sent in 1953 or the value of exports of rabbit skins in 1921, then the yearbook was the place to go. And, in addition to numbers, every yearbook included fascinating essays on particular topics. The 1903 one, for instance, had a revealing essay entitled ‘Maori sociology’, which tells as much about the social attitudes of Pākehā as of the social reality of Māori. We learn such things as: ‘The Maori is naturally of a dignified demeanour and a born orator.’ That volume also contains a detailed description of the hot baths of Rotorua and an intriguing analysis of the mineral composition of the different springs. I always find that when I go to look something up, I get waylaid by more engrossing content.

All this is now available on the screen of our laptop. Last evening Statistics New Zealand launched their digital yearbook collection. All the yearbooks up to 2008 are available on the web. Every individual yearbook, although not the whole collection, is word-searchable. And, even more valuable, the tables can be copied and pasted into Microsoft Excel; so you can put together your own time series and manipulate the statistics.

The collection is accompanied by a little disclaimer: ‘Historic issues of the yearbooks may contain language or views which reflect the time in which they were written and may be considered inappropriate or offensive today.’ But it is the record of precisely such attitudes that are so useful to us historians. The collection will be a godsend not only for historians but also other researchers, such as epidemiologists, who will now be able to very easily put together a time series about the causes of death.

The digital yearbooks join two other magnificent digital historic sources:

• Papers Past is a collection of historic newspapers from 1839 to 1945 produced by the National Library. It has been around for some years now but its collection has been growing all the time. The two most recent additions are the Maoriland Worker, that fundamental source of left-wing opinion in the years before and after the First World War, and the Press, one of Christchurch’s long-running institutions. This adds a valuable big-city perspective to the collection, which until recently has been stronger on the small towns than main centres. Papers Past provides word-searchability for most of the titles and this is a magnificent help for researchers. Last year when I attended a conference on New Zealand cultural history, most of the papers seemed to be based on discoveries from Papers Past. I confess that I delivered a paper on New Zealand memorials drawn heavily from a word search of the words ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ in Papers Past.
• AtoJs Online is a digitisation of the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, another production of the National Library. This collection has recently been extended from the first volume in 1858 all the way through to 1914. The AtoJs are the official papers presented to Parliament; so they contain very detailed reports from government departments, much official correspondence and many inquiries and reports on particular issues.

If, for example, having read the yearbook of 1903 you are interested in the Rotorua hot baths, then the AtoJs for 1905 includes the 1903 reports of the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, with excellent descriptions of the hot baths and ‘the Maori features at Rotorua’. It is easy to find because again the content is word-searchable (across all volumes this time), and your word is highlighted in yellow. So, now having got information from the AtoJs and the yearbook, all you need to do is go back to Papers Past and word search ‘Rotorua baths’ for 1903. You will find no less than 411 stories to read.

There was once a time when historical research involved a good deal of shoe leather, plenty of patience and no shortage of cash. You traipsed from archive to archive, waited endlessly until the volume you wanted was produced, and then you had the monotonous task of searching for your subject page by page. The digital revolution has transformed all this. There are few places in the world where searching the fundamental historical sources has become so easy. If the result is not an outpouring of exciting new discoveries, then we will be disappointed.

Thank you Statistics New Zealand and the National Library for bringing about this revolution. Historians are deeply in your debt. It’s now up to us to make the most of it all.

The main thing I’m looking for at Webstock – New Zealand’s major web conference – each year is a look at what’s going on at the cutting-edge of the internet, and some ideas about what the future of the web holds. Then I want to be able to take these ideas back to work and think about what we can do on Te Ara and on other web projects at Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. But this year I didn’t get as much of that as I was hoping.

The speakers at Webstock are all polished presenters, who seem to have done their time at Toastmasters or other kinds of public-speaking courses. But sometimes I felt the presentations were a little too slick – a bit more style than substance, and I was really looking for something I could get my teeth into. On the first day especially I found I was tiring of hearing too much about the presenters’ personal life stories and not enough about the topic at hand. I learned more about one presenter’s introversion and her house-in-a-tree than I did about publishing for the iPad (which was what was promised in the blurb). There is no denying that it’s a very cool tree house, but I really wanted to see the final version of the iPad app she started talking about, but then seemed to forget.

While I’m on the subject of things that I didn’t like, I found myself getting quite angry during the last two sessions on Friday afternoon, where we were being preached to by millionaires about the importance of happiness. It’s not that I’m against happiness or anything, and I actually agreed with a lot of what they said. But it’s a bit hard to swallow when someone who has sold their media company for an enormous amount of money says that the recession is kinda a good thing because it makes us re-think things, when you know that a lot of other people, who had nothing to do with causing the recession, are really suffering.

Enough whining though – there were lots of things to learn and to think about. Some of my particular favourites were:

• Lauren Beukes, a science-fiction novelist who talked about the power of fiction
• Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), whose cartoons I have long admired on the net
• Jessica Hische, a typographer and designer
• Michael B Johnson, head of the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar, who talked about processes and culture at Pixar.

A few days afterwards, after everything that got crammed into my brain in two days had settled a little bit, I considered my main aim at Webstock – to gain some insights into the likely future of the web. Despite no one addressing this specifically, I realised that I had gleaned quite a bit from various speakers. So here are my predictions.

In the future the internet will be:

• more gamified. Gamification is where people receive some kind of reward for completing tasks – turning something that isn’t a game into a game. All the presenters who talked about gamification were against it, and considered it manipulative and false motivation, but I still think it’s coming.
• more algorithmic. One presenter suggested that the internet was really a more natural place for algorithms than people, and algorithms are very busy running our searches and apparently trading our shares on the internet. I expect more of this kind of automation.
• more hand-made. Conversely, many of the bits of the internet that are still run by actual humans will be made with love and an artisan’s eye.
• prettier, with nice typography. Since the invention of technology such as Typekit web designers have been able to use more fonts in their designs, rather than just the standard handful that everyone has on their computers.
• the site of more protest and activism. This will be both on the internet – such as crashing or hacking internet sites in protest (such as occurred recently when Anonymous protested the Megaupload arrests), and off the internet – where the internet is used as a method of communication and organisation, as notably occurred, for example, in some Arab countries last year.
• more mobile. We’ve been talking about it for a while, but now it’s really taking off – we’re taking the internet with us where ever we go, and that’s going to lead to new opportunities and new challenges for people working in and on the internet.

So, those of you who were at Webstock, you’ve had a week now to recover; what were your highlights and lowlights? What would you like to see more of? What did you learn? Let us know in the comments.

A fox walks past the South London house of Peter Campbell, in his last cover illustration for the London Review of Books. Image: London Review of Books

The 1997 New Zealand historical atlas is much like a pre-internet version of Te Ara, with its swarm of little graphics and sidebars expanding on the subject of each of its large-format double-page maps. From the perspective of how specific places have altered over time, the Atlas deals with many of the subjects covered in Te Ara – earliest Polynesian settlement, glaciers, the Waikato wars of the early 1860s, Presbyterians and the ‘demon drink’, and mid-20th-century life in small-town New Zealand.

Here at Te Ara we refer to the Atlas all the time, and some of us have worked on both projects, including Malcolm McKinnon, who was general editor of the Historical atlas and has overseen Te Ara’s Places theme, the section that covers every geographical region in New Zealand, and urban historian Ben Schrader, responsible for Te Ara’s city entries.

But many talented individuals contributed to the success of the Atlas and it is sad to have to record the passing of one of them. Peter Campbell was a New Zealand artist best known for his airy, elegant cover illustrations for the London Review of Books (LRB), the erudite fortnightly which provides authoritative commentary on history, politics and literary criticism. He worked on the LRB since its first issue in 1979, and the cover of the current issue bears his drawing of a fox walking past the South London house where he and his wife Winifred, also New Zealand-born, had lived since 1963.

In a tribute to Peter Campbell in the current issue its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, says that he graduated from Victoria University in 1958 with a philosophy degree and an extra-curricular enthusiasm for book design, developed while working with the pyrotechnic poet, publisher, typographer and boxer Denis Glover. ‘Tramping trips at Christmas settled the New Zealand landscape in my mind,’ he wrote, and his homeland’s mountains, trees, architecture and fauna recurred in his writings and artwork throughout a life spent mainly in London. There he began working for the BBC on the richly illustrated books that accompanied major series such as Civilisation, The ascent of man and Life on earth. Once he began producing the covers for the LRB, his witty, meticulous style came to define the review. Mary-Kay Wilmers says, ‘More adjusted than most to his own wants and necessities, and so better able to accommodate other people’s, he was an exemplary person to work with.’ Campbell also wrote articles for the LRB on a bewildering variety of subjects – architecture and art history, dandelions, cycling, doors, ducks and his favourite places in the British Isles.

He played a critical part in the early development of the Historical atlas. ‘We called for design proposals in 1990–91,’ recalls Malcolm McKinnon. ‘Peter Campbell and Margaret Cochrane – a very accomplished typographer and graphic designer in her own right – submitted a proposal. Theirs was by far the best and we adopted it as our template. We made some changes, however, so they are not specifically credited with the design. But they are thanked in the preface to the Atlas, and that thanks was very heartfelt.’ It is gratifying to learn that an exhibition of Peter Campbell’s superb artwork will open in Wellington next year.

Te Ara salutes and farewells this panoptically curious, polymathic son of Aotearoa. E te tohunga mahi toi no ngā mea katoa – hoki atu ki a rātou kua whetūrangihia, moe mai ra, takoto mai ra, okioki e.

Blogger Melanie Lovell-Smith enjoying the 150th-anniversary edition of the Otago Daily Times

The Otago Daily Times (ODT) turns 150 today. Founded by Julius Vogel in 1861, the newspaper was the first daily newspaper in New Zealand and still proudly states today that it is independent and privately owned.

As an image researcher, I’ve been very lucky – Te Ara’s relationship with the ODT dates from 2003, and has enabled us to include many wonderful images in the encyclopedia from the Otago region. Currently we have 340 ODT images up on Te Ara, and more to come.

The first ones we received included such diverse images as the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III, visiting Dunedin; an elderly Japanese rugby player; and traditional New Zealand dress as interpreted by a new citizen. Later, when we started working on the themes Earth, Sea and Sky and The Bush, one of the great joys was being able to include some of chief photographer Stephen Jaquiery’s bird photographs, such as this one of a silvereye, or this, of a New Zealand pipit.

As someone who grew up in Dunedin, the ODT was my newspaper, and researching it for work was like coming home, in a odd way. Interestingly, there were some things that other staff who had also grown up in Dunedin remembered. One of them was the sex workers’ advertisements in the Personal columns, letting prospective clients know which small towns they would be visiting in the upcoming week.

The ‘Regions’ section of the ODT is also a section I remember well, with its local news and rural focus – and some wonderful photographs of things I remember from my childhood, such as hoar frosts and bad rabbits. And the mutton pies at Palmerston … travelling for a different job, one of my colleagues would insist on stopping there to get a mutton pie and a cheese roll – signs we were back down south.

There are many, many others – cute children, scarfies (both historical and contemporary), beautiful landscapes, and of course, our national hero, Shrek.

So thank you to the management for allowing us to reuse these images, to all the ODT photographers, who have taken such great photos, and thank you also to Glenda at the Star Shop for all her efficient assistance over the years – happy birthday to you from all of us at Te Ara!