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

A mighty tōtara has fallen

It’s been a tough year for those of us who admire the real shapers of our society. First it was Christopher Doig, who did so much for those very different passions: cricket and opera. Then there was Lloyd Morrison, who combined an entrepreneurial drive with a fierce belief in New Zealand and its culture. Then Jock Hobbs, who saved professional rugby and brought us the world cup (and was not a bad loose forward in his time). And now we mourn the loss of the country’s greatest scientist, Sir Paul Callaghan. They were all men who were cut off when they still had so much to give.

The tributes have already flowed widely for Paul Callaghan; but we have a special reason to remember his achievements, because nine months ago we launched a short biography he wrote for the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on another very great scientist and Nobel Prize-winner, Alan MacDiarmid. At the time I wrote a blog post pointing out that Sir Paul and his subject shared a great deal in their careers. Both were outstanding scientists in their respective fields. Paul Callaghan’s real speciality was how molecules moved in complex fluids, and he used nuclear magnetic resonance to explore these matters. But his research never remained just detailed papers hidden away in specialised journals. He always had a larger vision, and so other institutions flowed from his genius.

First, he set up an institute at Victoria University of Wellington to study advanced materials and nanotechnology. He called it the MacDiarmid Institute and it was the first, and rapidly became the most successful, of the country’s centres of research excellence. The centre attracted collaborators from around the world, pulled there by Paul Callaghan’s huge reputation and his wonderful skills of collegiality.

Second, Sir Paul was clever enough to see that his work in these areas also had real commercial value. So he put together a group to develop practical and commercially viable applications for his researches into nuclear magnetic resonance. Magritek was founded in 2004 with two employees. Today it employs over 20 people and sells its technology to companies throughout the world.

Paul Callaghan was a great scientist and an energetic entrepreneur and founder of institutions, but he was also a very great communicator. Anyone who heard one of his lectures will never forget his sheer enthusiasm, the clarity of his thought and the intellectual engagement he inspired in his audiences. For many New Zealanders this was discovered through his wide-ranging conversations on the radio with Kim Hill, which later became a book. Increasingly, in his last years he realised the importance of this public role. He presented to us a vision of a New Zealand which was no longer a country of sharemilkers and freezing workers, but of smart highly educated people who brought affluence to this country through their creativity and their scientific smartness. Few people better exemplified this Kiwi of the future than Sir Paul himself.

Finally, let me say personally that from those wild days in Weir House (a university hostel) in the 1960s, when I first met him as a fellow student, to a brief conversation several months ago, Paul was always a warm and extraordinarily generous human being. I have never heard a harsh word against him.

Te Ara is enriched by having Paul Callaghan’s authorship in our ranks. His fine biography of Alan MacDiarmid reflected his own aspirations as a public scientist. I hope that as you mourn his departure take a few minutes to read this superb short biography. It says as much about the author as the subject.

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.

More connections between New Zealand and the North East of England, as discovered during the recent Christmas holiday I spent with my partner Janis, visiting her family in South Shields. Click for part 1.

The city of Sunderland is less than 10 kilometres south of South Shields. Situated at the mouth of the River Wear, Sunderland is another north-eastern city built on coal mining and ship building. The mines and shipyards are now closed, but the Nissan car factory, along with engineering, textiles, paper making and IT, continue to provide work in the area.

The Wearmouth rail and road bridges, River Wear, Sunderland. The first Wearmouth bridge was built in 1796. The rail bridge (foreground) was built in 1879 and the road bridge (behind it) in 1929.

Chartist George Binns (1815–1847) provides a historical link between Sunderland and my own home town of Nelson, New Zealand. Binns was born into a family of Sunderland Quakers. After his parents’ deaths in 1837, he took over his father’s drapers shop. Binns and his friend James Williams became heavily involved in the chartist movement. Chartism was a radical, largely working-class movement. The name came from the People’s Charter of 1838, which called for such utopian measures as voting rights for all men (women’s suffrage was too wild an idea even for the chartists), the secret ballot and the abolition of the rule that only property owners could stand for Parliament. Many chartist leaders were imprisoned, while chartist demonstrations were sometimes violently broken up.

In the 1830s and 1840s Sunderland became a major site of chartist agitation. Binns and Williams set up a mechanics’ institute where local workers could read newspapers, along with a bookshop and newsagent that doubled as a meeting place for local radicals. Binns developed a reputation as a forceful orator at public meetings and wrote poetry based around chartist ideals. Binns and Williams formed the Sunderland Democratic Association, which supported ‘moral-force chartism’, the idea of achieving reform without the use of violence.

The state regarded all radicals as dangerous, regardless of the methods they advocated. In 1840 Binns and Williams were tried for attending illegal meetings and publishing a seditious handbill. They were sentenced to six months in Durham gaol. On their release in 1841 Binns went back to the drapery business, but continued agitating for reform.

Bridge Street in Sunderland. Binns and Williams set up their booksellers, stationers and newsagents at 9 Bridge Street.

Binns’ business struggled in the early 1840s and he was sent to debtors’ prison. Upon his release, Binns embarked in August 1842 for the New Zealand Company settlement of Nelson. Arriving in December, he found work supervising a whaling establishment.

When Binns became involved in a controversy over short-weight bread (bread that may not have been the weight it was advertised), prominent businessman Alfred Saunders attacked him in the Nelson Examiner as a ‘Chartist ringleader.’ Binns replied that he had nothing to do with chartism in New Zealand where settlers were ‘united … by a community of interest’ and ‘where there is no grievance to redress and no enemy to our weal.’ While trying to live a life of ‘peace and good-will’ in Nelson, Binns declared he had not abandoned his principles: ‘When I came to New Zealand it was after I had suffered imprisonment, sacrificed my business, and lost the goodwill of relations in an effort to free my country.’

Around this time, in 1843, Nelson labourers were in dispute with the New Zealand Company for higher wages. Binns did not become involved with this issue, perhaps because he saw New Zealand as the land of opportunity, where class conflict was unnecessary.

Nelson in 1841, the year before Binns arrived, painted by Charles Heaphy

On 17 June 1843, 22 Nelson settlers were killed at Wairau, along with four Māori. The settlers, under Arthur Wakefield, had tried to arrest Ngāti Toa chiefs Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata, after the Māori leaders evicted surveyors from disputed land. Governor Robert FitzRoy refused to take action against the Māori, maintaining that the settlers had illegally provoked the chiefs. Binns joined with other Nelson settlers in denouncing ‘the ferocious character of the savages’ and protesting at the government failure to act. Binns, like many British radicals, did not sympathise with Māori defending their land. Instead he appears to have seen Māori as standing in the way of progress, preventing the land from going to the encroaching settlers who would supposedly make the best use of it.

Binns took up employment as a baker after his whaling business failed in 1844. He was only to have a few more years in his land of promise. In 1847, at the age of 31, he died of consumption after three years of illness. The Northern Star, the foremost British chartist paper, described him in an obituary as ‘a handsome, high-spirited, talented, true-hearted man – every inch a Democrat.’

In Sunderland the drapery business established by George Binns’ father, George senior, became a household name as Binns Department Store, in business until 1993. In Nelson there is no memorial to show the connection between the fledgling settlement and the heady days of chartist protest in Britain.

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.

One year ago tomorrow, at 12.51 p.m. on a Tuesday, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck south-east of Christchurch’s business district. Our thoughts are with the people who lived through it and are still living through it, and with people who lost someone in the quake.

While updating Te Ara’s story about the 2010–11 Canterbury earthquakes, we looked at the 10,000+ aftershocks map in awe. We started to wonder about the history of earthquakes in the region, why we have so many earthquakes in New Zealand and how they’re measured.

The Web Team here at Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, went looking through the wealth of information, diagrams and data on Te Ara, NZHistory and available through Geonet, and assembled an infographic to present this information together – click on the image below to view the complete infographic. It is the first of a series of infographics and visualisation that we’re calling ‘Perspectives’. The idea behind them is to give our users a new way of looking at aspects of our culture and history. Each of the Perspectives infographics will be visually rich, filled with interesting facts, available under Creative Commons (BY NC), and hopefully they will have something for anyone at any level to take away with them.

Special thanks to Geonet and GNS Science.