New texts, including Tutira and Sir Peter Buck's Ethnologies

Kia ora kotou,

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is pleased to announce that a number of freshly-digitised New Zealand and Pacific books are now freely available online.

These titles include:

• First Lessons in Maori, by William Leonard Williams
  
  Writing a review of this book in Te Ao Hou in 1968, the reviewer had this to say:
  
  "Although the last ten years or so have seen a very rapidly growing interest in Maori, a great improvement in teaching techniques and an increasing number of modern textbooks, this Grammar, in spite of certain weaknesses and omissions, is still the most valuable book of its kind for those interested in the structure of the language. All teachers should own and study it for, apart from the modern works of such trained linguists as Dr Bruce Biggs, Dr Pat Hohepa and J. Prytz Johansen, no subsequent grammar book of this type has added anything of significance to this pioneering work; these modern linguists would undoubtedly each acknowledge his debt to 'First Lessons' as a major reference."
  
  
• Tutira: A New Zealand Sheep Station, by H. Guthrie-Smith
  
  Written in 1921, this book is a loving and detailed account of the ecology of a 40,000-head sheep station on the shores of Lake Tutira in the Hawkes Bay, and the impact of land-clearances and farming practices on the environment. It has been called "one of the great English-language classics of environmental history".
  
  
• The Early Journals of Henry Williams 1826-1840, by Lawrence M. Rogers
  
  A major figure in the drafting and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Henry Williams was the leader of the Church Missionary Society mission in the Bay of Islands from 1823, and was instrumental in helping to familiarise the early missionaries with the Maori language.
  
  
• Legends of the Maori, I and II, by Maui Pomare:
  
  "In 1911 Pomare, Ngata and Buck had agreed to divide between them aspects of the study of Maori history and ethnology; Pomare's portion was to be myths and legends. The two-volume Legends of the Maori, written in collaboration with James Cowan, was published posthumously." (from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography)
  
  
• The Past and Present of New Zealand; with its Prospects for the Future (1868), by Rev. Richard Taylor
  
  A contemporary of William Williams, Richard Taylor conducted missionary work in the central North Island, particularly around the Wanganui. According to the 1966 Encyclopedia of New Zealand, "Although much of Taylor's life was devoted to his missionary work, he was an acute observer of, and a prolific writer upon, natural and ethnological phenomena."
  
  
• Through Ninety Years 1826-1916, by Frederic W. Williams
  
  Notes on the lives of William and William Leonard Williams, First and Third Bishops of Waiapu.
  

Other books hopefully of interest to readers in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands now online include:

• Aureretanga: Groans of the Maori (1895), by G. W. Rusden
  
  
• Ethnology of Tokelau Islands, by Gordon MacGregor
  
  
• Ethnology of Manihiki and Rakahanga, by Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa)
  
  
• Ethnology of Tongareva, by Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa)
  
  
• Report of the Commission to Inquire Into and Report Upon the Organization of District and Village Government in Western Samoa
  
  
• An Account of Samoan History up till 1918, by Te'o Tuvale

Any feedback on these titles, including suggestions for future digitisation, errata, and general comments are most welcome.

Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand

In November 2006 the NZETC completed a large project with the National Library of New Zealand to make 100 years of New Zealand science available online. NZETC was responsible for both managing the transcription and encoding of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand from 1868 to 1961, and the design and implementation of the delivery system for the digitised content. With the project ultimately delivering over 65,000 pages of digitised content, this has been the biggest project in which the Centre has been involved

Williams' "A Dictionary of The Maori Language" now online

Kia ora koutou!

It's my pleasure to announce on behalf of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre that A Dictionary of the Maori Language (1957 edition), by Herbert William Williams, has been digitised and is now freely available online.

The NZETC is a unit within the VUW Library, whose mission includes building a free online library of NZ and Pacific resources. As well as the Williams dictionary, the NZETC's online collection also includes the Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary by Edward Tregear, as well as a number of works relating to Maori history and culture, mostly by 19th century Pakeha historians and ethnographers.

At present the Williams dictionary can be browsed like any other text on the NZETC website, chapter by chapter, though in the future we intend to use this and our other dictionaries to offer online word-lookup services like that offered by Learning Media using the Ngata dictionary.

We would be grateful to receive feedback from readers: comments both positive and negative, suggestions, and errata.

The NZ Electronic Text Centre has recently added several other digitised books to our free online collection

This batch consists mainly of more texts on New Zealand colonial history, and the New Zealand Wars. The new texts since our last announcement are:

• Check to Your King, by Robin Hyde
  
  
• The Maori Race, by Edward Tregear
  
  
• Soldiering in New Zealand, Being Reminiscences of a Veteran, by Major Frederick Gascoyne
  
  
• The Maori King, by Sir John Eldon Gorst
  
  
• History of NZ, Volume 1 and Volume 2, by George William Rusden
  
  
• From Tasman to Marsden, by Robert McNab
  
  
• The Long White Cloud, by William Pember Reeves
  
  
• Maori Wars of the Nineteenth Century, by Stephenson Percy Smith
  
  
• New Zealand and the War, by William Swainson
  
  
• Kōtare 2000, Volume Three, Number Two

As usual, we have identified the names of many people (and places, etc) within these texts, in order that each mention of a person's name is hyperlinked to an index page containing a thumbnail gallery of images related to that person, links to other texts which they wrote, or in which they're mentioned, as well as links to relevant pages on other sites such as the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara, Wikipedia, and the National Library of New Zealand. An example is the page on Hone Heke

This update brings to 48,800 the number of pages on the NZETC website. Of these, about half are pages about authors, or about people, places, and organisations mentioned in the texts, and the other half are chapters and sub-sections of books, including over 8,500 figures.

We've just recently installed a rather flash new server for running our website software. This means we can now update the site more frequently, fixing errors more promptly, publishing new texts as soon as they're digitised, and introducing some new features. The first new feature to be added will be a high-level index of the site by subject and genre.

Links with Early New Zealand Books website

On behalf of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre and the Early New Zealand Books project at Auckland University, I'm pleased to announce an update to the NZETC website, to provide integrated access to all the digitised texts published online by the NZETC and the ENZB.

The NZETC website now includes pages for the authors of all texts digitised by either the NZETC or the ENZB, and these pages provide access to those digitised texts on whichever site they are available.

For one example, see the page about William Colenso:
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-207684.html


This page now includes links to digitised editions of two of Colenso's
works:

1) "Notes on the Ancient Dog of the New Zealanders", from the NZETC collection, and
2) "The authentic and genuine history of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi", from the ENZB.

We hope that this data integration will make it easier for people to find early NZ texts online, and also to discover related texts and related personalities, just by browsing the site.

We hope in future to extend the exercise to cover related resources in other online collections. Any feedback is welcome.

I'd like to personally thank John Lawrie from Auckland University for his work on the Auckland end of this data integration.

Con

Te Ao Hou

In September 2005 the NZETC assisted the National Library of New Zealand to make Te Ao Hou available online. Te Ao Hou / The New World (1952–76) was a bilingual quarterly published by the Maori Affairs Department, and printed by Pegasus Press, 'to provide,' as its first issue said, 'interesting and informative reading for Maori homes ... like a marae on paper, where all questions of interest to the Maori can be discussed'.

The Te Ao Hou website

Relaunch of NZETC collection using Topic Maps

The website of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has been
re-launched, with a new topic map infrastructure based on TM4J.
http://www.nzetc.org/

The website is a digital library, providing access to a couple of
hundred digitised books and manuscripts. The site has been running for
about 3 years, but this week we've upgraded it significantly, putting it

on a new foundation - a topic map.

The topic map presently contains 46807 topics, 192492 associations, and
43942 occurrences; roughly 150Mb of XTM. We are using TM4J as out topic
map server, using TM4J's "in-memory" back-end, running on Java 1.4.1 on
Windows 2000. The topic map consumes approximately 1.3GB of RAM.

The source material for the site is a collection of TEI (Text Encoding
for Interchange) XML files, each of which is an encoding of a source
object (i.e. a book). Most of the topic map is harvested from these
files using XSLT. Each book, chapter, subsection, figure, author,
publisher, etc, is represented by a topic, names are harvested from
headings and captions in the text, and the containment hierarchy is
represented by associations. These associations are used to generate
tables of contents, as well as to provide "next" and "previous" links

between web pages.

For each fragment of TEI text, we harvest 2 HTML occurrences which are
alternative representations of that piece of text. One is a "scholarly"
(fussy) view, in which page numbers, errors, deletions and corrections
(in manuscripts), etc are all rendered, and the other is a "basic"
(simplified) view, in which spelling errors are silently corrected, page
numbers are not displayed, etc. These alternatives are distinguished
with "basic" and "scholarly" scoping topics. At present only the
scholarly view is visible on the public website, but we plan to make the
basic view visible during next week. Cocoon XSLT pipelines are used to
transform the TEI into HTML (and some other formats).

Names of people, places, etc, are also marked up in the TEI, and these
are also harvested as topics, with associations linking each person to
the places in the texts where they are mentioned, the figures in which
they are depicted, and to the texts which they wrote. We use a MADS XML
file to maintain an authoritative list of names, from which we also
harvest some biographical notes and links to external websites.
Consequently, the system can generate a web page to represent each
person, providing links to all the places in the library where they are
mentioned, all the texts they wrote, and a thumbnail gallery of the
pictures in which they appear, and links to relevant external sites.
e.g. http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-207418.html

The ontology used is a subset of the CIDOC CRM (a museum ontology).

The front end of the site uses Cocoon to render pages (each of which
represents a topic, and some "neighbouring" topics). We use Cocoon's
templating system "jxtemplate" to render each topic. JXTemplate is
designed to be very like XSLT, with an expression language called
"JXPath" which is more-or-less a superset of XPath, but which also
allows for traversal of Java objects via path expressions, e.g.
"$topic/occurrences[type=$ontology/html]". This avoids the conceptual
mis-match that can occur when using XSLT, which is tree-oriented, to
style XTM, which really represents a cyclic graph. We had to write a few
Java functions to add JXPath support for topic sorting, traversal of the
type hierarchy, and a few other features, but nothing too hard. We use
several different templates to render the different types of topics.

In future we plan to harvest dates from the texts, and provide
timeline-based access to the texts. Our main technical concern is to
replace the in-memory topic map with a database, since we need to scale
up the topic map as our collection grows, and as we add more semantic

markup to the TEI.

Thanks very much to the members of TopicMapMail who have been an
invaluable resource during the (several month) gestation of the new
website.

Conal.

Kotare NZ Notes and Queries Project Launched

Kōtare quite deliberately draws on the example of Notes and Queries, the English periodical which, for well over a century, has printed brief articles and notes on language and literature, on history and society, together with readers' queries, and reviews of works on related topics. Similarly, Kōtare will include short factual notes, reports and comments on archival and manuscript material, hitherto unavailable or rediscovered texts, bibliographical and lexicographical observations, and reviews of relevant publications.

Kotare