 I can put Matthew at ease, but it's not going to be... You've got calculations today? Yeah. I do actually have. So, we actually got an email in from a guy asking about one of their ancestors, Arama Karaka, and they said I was looking for information on a Māori chief called Arama Karaka. And they'd been up at 150th of New Zealand War's commemorations. And so, these are the kind of queries we often get within the ministry. So, where we first start off looking through is... I generally start with the NZB. Is there a Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on this person? Because if we can, we can just direct them straight to that person. But in this case, there wasn't. There were a number of results if we search through the NZB and actually that's where I'll try and flip through here. That's not a problem. Sorry. So, just in case you're not familiar with the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, it basically has three and a half thousand New Zealanders in it and of those three and a half thousand New Zealanders, around 500 Māori, historical figures up until... covering figures up until people who sort of flourished around the 1960s. So, we're getting into a bit of a gap now. Largely done as a project around the 150th of the Treaty and Matthew's dad had quite a significant part to play within these biographies. So, they're pretty solid. So, we start there. So, I have a search through and find out that, yes, Ata Makaraka is mentioned through other biographies but there is no biography of Ata Makaraka. And the other downside was as I was looking through just the NZB biographies, it came clear that there was more than one Ata Makaraka. In fact, there were a number. And so, the very short answer to the question who is Ata Makaraka, Ata Makaraka is actually the Māori form of Adam Clark. And what happened is that he was sort of... his name was used in homage in a sense when missionaries went around New Zealand baptising Māori. And this is one of these really interesting ideas about we take it for granted today that you might have a first name, a surname, possibly a middle name, and that that is kind of the convention for names. Now, traditionally for Māori, Māori would often have one name or a variety of names used in different contexts, but a name. Not a surname, because you didn't need a surname because when we have Takaniā Takiro, he didn't need to say, my name is Takaniā Takiro Smith or whatever because what he would say is kōhikurangi tamāanga. So my mountain is hikurangi. So we had, and so I used to talk about this Māori in terms of identification, had this form of what she described as triangulation, that once you sort of take the name plus the pepeha, which includes the mountain, or who the important tepuna was, people could actually work out quite clearly who that person is. And you'll see that often when people start working through, rather than saying who are you and who your parents, they'll start very broadly out from me. We work their way into hapū and then say, oh, you saw into those child or whatever. So, but we're still left with this problem of āramakaraka and we have, for instance, one of the people we have is āramakaraka mokunuiarangi. So his first name or his original name was mokunuiarangi. He gets āramakaraka put on, that double banger first last name and then he can end up being either ārama mokunuiarangi, āramakaraka mokunuiarangi or just āramakaraka and that's when it gets really difficult because reflecting on some of the sort of digitisation issues that we have now where we think, oh, maybe if we've got all the stuff being digitised and coming along early New Zealand box and NZTC and the AJHRs, that kind of thing, maybe if we can automate this, maybe we can pull all that information in together. But one of the real big problems with that is how do you tell which person is which? So, I wasn't expecting a blank slide. There we go. So here are just some of the ārama karakas that you will find from 19th century New Zealand. ārama karakata rai uaua taranaki, ārama karaka haututu te uri o hau at North, ārama karaka kukitau, ngāti tūpa around Waikato, ārama karaka te aho, also Waikato, ārama karaka of Ngāti Raukawa, ārama karaka mokonuiarangi, ngāti rangitihi, ārama karaka pi wau ma, who named his son, Wurumu ārama karaka just to sort of make it all a little bit confusing. So, in terms of, I've actually got examples of, ārama karaka mokonuiarangi, leading Te Arawa chief, head of the Ngāti Tūwhareti hapu based at Matata. He gave his early support to the Crown during the New Zealand wars. Karaka led his people in campaigns against the hoho followers of Kiti Opa in 1865, and is a member of the Te Arawa contingent led by Captain Gilbert Mere. Played a prominent role in the hunt for tukoti. Often, hideously mispronounced as tukoti. So, very easy way to remember that one there is that kō te rhymes with me, like from the Simpsons. Kō rhymes with or, shok and or, and when people saw tukoti, there was a bit of shok and or, and te, te for two. So, te kōti, nice and easy. So, Arama Karaka, Arama Karaka P of Te Mahūri Hūri, and he was Pat's most well-known for marrying Harayata, who was previously married to Honiheke, another well-known figure. And as I noted, his son was Wurumu Arama Karaka P. Arama Karaka P also signed the Treaty of Waitangi at Mangungu, and this becomes relevant right at the end of my talk, around Treaty signings. And another one we have, and this is in DNZB, which sort of illustrates one of the issues is Arama Karaka from Taranaki, who is just goes by Arama Karaka and talking about, made the following year, Rāwiti's people who had rallied under the leadership of Arama Karaka, relative of Rāwiti, were besieged at Niniopā by Katatoria Tarangitaki with their Te Atiāti Awa followers of Ngati Rau Nui allies. As it was a desperate situation, Arama Karaka sought aid from Ihaia. So, I mean, the obvious thing here is when we're talking about differentiating, that if they have you know, part of that name through, that's an obvious way. Except of course that in secondary sources, the historical secondary sources, often sometimes of the right, sometimes the writers are confused which person we're talking about. So, they'll get it wrong. They'll give you the name of another person, but be kind of not quite right. Now, we take for granted the fact that today we kind of have this unique way of identifying, differentiating ourselves from other people. Which is basically the birth certificate. But this is a relatively new-ish thing. It wasn't until 1930 that official Māori birth and death records were kept, but not reliably until the Second World War. So, what we have is up until kind of around 1950, this really uncertain issue around who people are. And if we're doing kind of authoritative historical research, that becomes a potential difficult liability. So, one of the things looking through was what do we do? What's a way to approach this? And the first place I started actually was internally we have a database, the BIS database, brief information sheets, which whenever someone was potentially up to have a Denzi B entry done of them, then someone would fill out these brief information sheets. And sometimes this information, which is, it's held internally, so this is not online currently at the moment, so it's held internally. And some of this information is actually amazingly good. Like it's really good it's referenced and that. So, the initial thought was there's 500 Māori Denzi B entries and 2,000 Māori entries in here. Maybe I should just look at sort of tidying that up and doing some work around there and starting there. The problem is as I found out working through that there was some really useful content in there, some average to poor content in there and some just really pointless content. There was one for Tutaka Ngahu, who's a well-known Tuhoe chief, who's had been put in as first name Tutaka and last name Ngahu, which isn't, you know, they just broken his name in half. And there was no other information, no iwi information or whatever. So if I worked through that there would be a lot of effort and time going into tidying up something which was a very variable quality. So what we did instead was cherry-picked and pulled out the good stuff to start working on. And then I had Mark Darby sort of work through and write up short biographies which I'll get onto that. But before we do yeah, so anyway, that wasn't going to work in terms of your sort of identifying a person I looked around at other things. There's also Fletcher's Māori Names database. I don't know if people have come across that. It's Waikato University has have digitised that with the help of I think they got the records from National Library and so that's actually a really good resource. It's got about 13,000 names on it. I should add Māori names there means any Māori name so a person, a place, a thing, a pa. But it's often a good little starting point I went up and had a talk to them so it's the library that's currently running it and but what they don't do is they don't create an authoritative name within there. So they'll say this person here go and see also these are the variations of the forms and name. Whereas what I'm looking for is kind of an authoritative form of the name so that you can say yes also this name, this name, this name but this is who we consider it to be. And so sometimes you sort of look afar and end up coming back a little bit closer. I was talking to Nancy Schwalbrick who's now the senior editor for Te Ara and she said I have you thought of the indexes in the DNZB biographies and actually I hadn't but when I looked at the indexes what happened was any time anyone obviously is mentioned within a biography their name then appears in the index and what they had done is when they did their name they might just mention their name within the index but sorry within the story but within the index they would put what they believed to be their kind of full authoritative name. So there's a couple of thousand names there that have both been macronised and also in the form that kind of follows a set methodology through there. So what we've done is we've digitised those and got a researcher whose job and I didn't envy her this at all, she had to go through and check the original version against the digitised version and make sure all the macrons were in the right place. Very careful about it I would say, she's very, very cheerful about it. Because that's one of the key things is that as well as having a kind of a particular form in terms of the name we want the macronised version of that name because that's what people are kind of interested in and I often come to Te Ara for the macronisation of the place names in the people's names. So there's an example of one of the digitised pages. Now the red pen there is actually it was printed and then someone meticulously went through checking all five volumes and I think it was actually it was, it was Angela Balara so fortunately I had Angela Balara's copies that she'd gone through and checked and she'd gone through and made the changes around the macrons so we have not just a printed version but the kind of 808 printed version and so actually that was what our researcher had to deal with sort of these horrible scribbly little red lines but we got there. So in terms of how I kind of envision our biographies, a little bit like a pyramid that at the top we have the DNZB 500 odd very in-depth research going into those and the reality is that the time and research it takes to do a full DNZB biography means that we'd actually need a lot more resources before we started doing that doing that again but what we can do in the meantime is these short bios 250 to 300 words and the name authority will be basically a single line indicating iwi affiliations and the sort of date that person exists so we can kind of differentiate between these people. Right and that's just a description of that. Macron's a name form following DNZB and Tatawhiti naming conventions. Right so what we found when Mark who I mentioned before started doing his short biographies is in terms of time and resource obviously it's sort of best-being for Buck he said was he found that if he was doing similarly related biographies he could get through a lot quicker which sort of makes sense I mean it's kind of logical and so I got him to look at the New Zealand Wars biographies of Māori involved in the New Zealand Wars we have David Green internally who's written a handbook on New Zealand Wars so I asked him if he could put up 50 of the most important Māori that don't have DNZB entries or online biographies and we'll sort of work our way through that and so that's what Mark did and he went through that list putting together those biographies and so here we have on the left Ahumai Te Porata and she kind of has an extraordinary story and I still find it actually amazing that we don't have a DNZB biography of her so Ahumai Te Porata who was Ahumai Te Porata is a young woman she fought alongside her immediate family Ngāti Raukaua Kinfolk at the 1864 Battle of Ōrākau she was accompanied by her father Te Porata, her uncle a brother named Hiziri Te Porata and her husband major mayor then an officer in the cavalry defence force that was besieging the fortifications at Ōrākau called on the people with them to allow women and children to leave Ahumai is said to have replied kitu mati ngā tāne me mate ano ngā wahine me ngā tamariki if the men are to die, the men and children will die also now you've probably heard that or some of you would have heard that along with ka whawhaito ne mātau and variations of you know we will fight on forever so they said you know let the women and children out and they said well what's the point she's going to kill the men, you might as well kill us as well she ended up being one of the few survivors of the insuring attack her father, uncle and husband all died she survived despite being shot through the torso her shoulder had in the wrist hand and arm she succeeded in reaching her home at Waipapa near Lake Taupo with her brother Hiziri Te Porata and other survivors of Ngāti Te Kohira and Ngāti Raukaua in the following year Ahumai's people were led by their chief and priest Al-Katoa at the small village of Tātaroa near Taupo so holding pāimātiri ritual's lieutenant-meat of HMS Kura Kō wrote into the settlement he was seized while a council of war decided his fate Ahumai, whose wounds were barely healed walked across the marae and silently sat at Meade's feet and act which saved his life more than 40 years later a white-haired Ahumai Te Porata could be seen walking into Taupo township to collect her pension she died at Moorki near Taupo in 1908 so there are a number of other biographies that are kind of like that that are very significant New Zealand wars are a very significant part of our history but under-documented and but from this this also led to one of the projects working on at the moment which is for Waitangi 175 so next year 175th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and there's in terms of the Treaty we often focus on the Treaty at Waitangi but there were nine sheets that were taken around New Zealand around 50 signings around 500 people that signed it and there's a map of where it was gone so basically one of the questions that followed for me is who were the people that signed the Treaty of Waitangi and what we have at the moment oops I'm doing it on the wrong one I'll come back to that so we might come back to that yeah okay that's not going to work, oh here we go okay so what we do have at the moment is effectively this will work for me we've got the names, we've got the signing and what we do know is this basic bit of information about them the name, what their probable name was Iwi Affiliations and obviously where they signed and when but we actually have DNZB information on some of these people and also as we found out when Mark was doing the research he said oh and under the people I'm doing biographies for signed the Treaty but they don't have DNZB biographies so one of the things we're working over the next eight weeks is both writing out little short bits of information about each signing of the Treaty but also trying to do little short bios of every person that we can identify that signed the Treaty and obviously some of them we won't be able to but it will be there added bit of information so as well as just seeing the name there so there Wadamu Kingi Wadarapa then you would have a little bit bit more information about him and yes so I'll go back to my last man that's it okay current slide and this is kind of a really interesting idea and I don't know if you can actually can reasonably well I kind of like this because it's kind of like who have we got who there at the signing and this is one of these examples of how hard it is to find information this is kind of where people were settled we said we had number one there's Hobson and he's sort of in the middle-ish which you'd expect Nias and there's the captain James Busby we've got Henry Williams involved in translation some of the Missionaries Richard Taylor number five and Bishop Pompallier and so on and then this massive group from there to there running all the way there and across there which is 13 Māori so I mean to be fair 14 running down there is Europeans as well but it just means this information is kind of it's there but it's a bit sketchy and so the main aim of the project is to try and pull out the easily available secondary source information write it up and then most importantly make it available on the internet so people can find it and that is my tool oh wait before I go Julia you here Julia came to make me remind you at 1 and T there's it's the other stand there's like a little questionnaire which you can answer the question who is Arama Karaka for the possibility of winning a book and now that you know the answer you definitely was a good chat so yeah yeah sure oh well just I wasn't going to talk about a manga but just the relevance there was that he had been one of the treaty signatures so that particular Arama Karaka had been one of the treaty signatures so obviously once we start adding that little biography and there when you click on Arama Karaka there it will come up and say just the information we have about him that short biography yeah I think so I'm not actually completely sure I should have checked that this is all quite checkable on NZ History has all the various sheets with the kind of this form of the name so nothing that a control F I love this talk it made me so excited thank you Kirstie for telling me to come so I'm at Digital in New Zealand and we've just started well we started last year and I went away and I come back and we're doing a thing where we're trying to link together authorities so people authorities and this is I'm totally you're not going to be able to lead this room really good but are you going to put these authorities so obviously the DMZB records are up and that's wonderful are the authorities going to be up as themselves on the website as kind of each authority has its own URL that we can reference and that is something that's online that's certainly the that is the current plan I guess is a short answer and I mean I will just straight now say that I tend to have a textual content focus so I don't think pretty so I'm quite happy to just go bang hey there you are and if you have a look it's very similar it's very basic but hey you know sometimes when you're searching that is the only information you find and better that than nothing yeah just get it up the long answer is we're trying to work out what plan don't make it pretty I'm wondering Basil if what we're also seeing is something where a model of biography that is Western Pakeha and European coming against an idea of a corporate identity within a Maori context and I'm asking that question because I'm trying to probe what does biography actually mean in a Maori context and whether going through the process of disambiguation of names is one thing but I think the bigger issue is actually what are we trying to produce and what are we trying to lock in in terms of X having biography Y and contextualized Z where I would see biography as a networked kind of suite of relationships that seems more in keeping with the notion of identity formation within a Maori setting but runs counter to a European model of disaggregated, individuated decaporialized and effective. On there, if you have a look through the Maori biographies in DNZB what you'll find is not every single one but the majority of them have fagapapa in there so that you can figure out not just who that person is but how do they relate to other people and that of course if anyone's sort of tried to track to who, who, to, Kenals and who we happen to be talking at at any particular time becomes really valuable because of six of them all floating around using that title to who, to, Kenal and so that fagapapa is a really important part of it and the thing you do realise as you go and throw is as important as the information you find it out about them individually as who were what is that kind of surrounding fagapapa, who are there children you can't just pull them out in isolation Long was to lay just search 29 chapters Kia ora, thank you for that wonderful talk I was following on from Chris's question really but I'm also interested in name authorities being put on the internet not, I don't think there's anyone the name authority that's going to go up there's going to be a number of them. I'm with the Turnbull Library and we are putting up names that arise from groups of letters or that sort of thing we may not be able to determine which person it is to disambiguate it but we're going to put up an authority set which says this is what we know from this repository, this collection and it's going to be encoded to the EAC standard encoded archival context which is a way of structuring information and separating the name, the alternate name the dates the relationships and so forth so I guess I'm just putting in a plug for whatever you put up as the raw data to have some sort of standardised encoding around it so that we can maybe talk to each other over time I've got two answers to there and Matthew take note of that because that sounded important and something we need to know about because it makes sense to do that and then secondly in terms of what the sort of longer term plan for this content is first just get it out and get it up but I've talked with Nancy around bringing together that with the DNZB biography so have the long form biographies but we don't have a long form biography have the shorter form biography and then but once we get it up if we put it up on Te Ara then we'll sort of make it fit with the look and feel of Te Ara but also the style guide and all that kind of things but that's sort of probably in my thinking that's kind of like slightly two-ish years away because that also involves going to bring all our Māori content into a single place as well so all of it as well as the biographical. If I could just do a follow on just a follow on because it does make this link very nicely in pro-zipographical studies where people are building what they call digital people databases they don't talk about the facts they talk about factoids and factoids are those constructions of what we think of as the knowledge to date but that's historically specific knowledge that as long as you can track where it's come from who is the authority of the time who has expressed that and how you've evaluated that as a piece of information then you can go back and have actually a very dynamic and live way of creating the lives of people that are historically situated but also contemporaneously as in now manufactured and I guess that's the point extra sort of reflective level of how we're actually creating these lives even if it's trying to just disambiguate names. I'm going to thank Basil and just to pick up on your point Nicola we will talk we're very good at text back end systems to be honest not so good so working to talk to anyone who can help with that but thank you Basil for that talk and thank you to everyone who came to the session and enjoy the look.