NZETC scheduled mainenance on Tuesday 21st June

The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection will be down for an extended period of time on the morning of Tuesday the 21st of June due to scheduled maintenance. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Carnival Student Graduation Programmes are now live

To mark the first graduation ceremony of 2016 the Carnival collection of Victoria student graduation programmes is now live on the NZETC.

The collection contains official ceremony programmes, revue performance scripts and other capping ephemera from 1903 to 1993. Interestingly the early performances included songs in Te Reo Māori.

Victoria's graduation ceremony was initially known as 'capping day' before becoming a week long celebration. Like today a formal capping parade and ceremony was held which was then followed by a student revue performance.

The first Carnival began with a performance at the Sydney Street schoolroom in 1903 and soon moved to the Town Hall. By the 1950s productions were held at the Wellington Opera House. A notable feature of the student revue performance were songs that teased the University and lecturers. In later years the targets of these songs included local and national personalities.


http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-carnival.html

Complete Prose of James K. Baxter digitised for free access

A lifetime of prose by celebrated New Zealand writer James K. Baxter covering over a million words and four hefty hardback books is being released free on the internet by Victoria University.

Baxter’s prose is now accessible through the NZETC (New Zealand Electronic Text Collection), Victoria University’s large and ever-growing digital resource comprising historical texts, manuscripts, and contemporary texts.

Complete Prose was published as a four-volume set last year by Victoria University Press. It is edited by Baxter scholar John Weir, who began working on the publication 40 years ago. Its publication was met with praise by scholars, critics and Baxter fans.

In his review in the NZ Listener, Baxter scholar Paul Millar said, “Reading Baxter’s Complete Prose en masse offers new and unexpected perspectives on his life and work.”

The four volumes draw on Baxter’s prose writing from his first draft of ‘Before Sunrise’ as a teenager in 1942 to his ‘Confession to the Lord Christ’ shortly before his death in 1972. Reviews, essays, lectures, journal articles, interviews and correspondence with friends and critics are some of what readers will be able to browse. The volumes are a chronicle of Baxter’s life and times, his preferences and prejudices, his crises and turbulent occasions.

Fergus Barrowman, publisher at Victoria University Press, says Complete Prose is a significant addition to Baxter scholarship.

“Complete Prose is a testament to Baxter’s huge contribution to New Zealand literature, culture and society. In its digital form, it will be readily accessible to many more readers, which will allow a continuing engagement with Baxter’s work.”

The collection is accessible here: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-baxter.html