 Okay, hello, mereka. Aula aq, iわzaia bi ira Swarandaueprintaplatia iwi te mi aqt hacer succil, arangia New Zealand pleion nama te Senteny sanatahi anata wa this year, with a number of other organisations, to help give people some context for the upcoming centenary. But first, you know, why the centenary? Just over 100,000 New Zealanders served overseas in the First World War. Many of them, young men like this one, had never left home before. And if you think of New Zealand's population at the time, which was just over a million people, that's 10% of our population being taken overseas, which is sort of staggering to me. And of the young men who served, nearly one in five didn't come home. So in terms of planning for the centenary, there will be commemorative events and ceremonies and so on. And we have a WW 100 New Zealand website and social media presence where people can go and find out what's happening. But we've also got a real focus on helping New Zealanders to understand the impact of the First World War, both on those who went away, but just as importantly on those who stayed at home. So this diary, for example, starts to give us a sense of that impact. This is the first page of the War Diary of a man called Alfred Cameron. It starts in August 1914, just after war broke out. And it's a diary that's held in the Alexander Turnbull Library and was brought to my attention by Dylan Owen earlier this year. It's a little bit hard to read, but you can see that Alfred's writing about how he has enlisted for the first New Zealand expeditionary force to the European War. So obviously it wasn't called the First World War then. And when I look at this, I get a real sense of someone signing up for a great adventure. You know, I look at the way he's embellished the word diary. And I imagine him with his fountain pen and tidy handwriting anxious to record what happens to him. Compare that with the last page of his diary. He can't even put a date on it. He just calls it any day. It's actually very emotional. It's actually in 1915 after he landed and fought at Gallipoli. So he's writing, it's just hell here now. Damn the place. No good writing anymore. And on that right hand page there, my copper George dead. Killed August the 7th, bullet through the head. Sorry, that's both embarrassing. It feels a little trivial to go on to talk about Twitter for the next 10 minutes. So the challenge we've got is how do we use digital media to convey a sense of this very human and personal impact and also the wider significance of the First World War to an audience who really have no living memory of it. You know, there are no First World War veterans left alive. And in part that's why we started this collaborative project to tweet quotes from 100-year-old New Zealand diaries in real time 100 years later. So I'm assuming that most of you know Twitter and just in case any of you are less familiar, it's basically like dipping into a really fast-flowing stream of information shared by people or organisations you're interested in following. So you can have conversations with people or share their tweets with people who follow you. And even though each tweet is constrained by 140 characters, it's kind of amazing what you can pack into them. So this is a Twitter stream that I started following just around the time I began working on the online strategy for the centenary. And it's run by an Oxford history graduate who's essentially tweeting the history of World War II as it happens on this date and time. So every tweet is a story in itself and a summary of what's happening in the Second World War on the same day that it happened. And this is what Orwin, who runs the real-time World War II Twitter account, has to say about it. I'm hoping to use Twitter to bring the past to life, helping people understand the past as people at the time saw it without the benefit of hindsight. I want them to see that people then were just like they are. This is another project that I came across a couple of years ago. It's not a Twitter project. This is a screenshot from a website. So what you're looking at here is the transcripts of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon unedited and simply republished. So I read these one night and I was completely entranced. I actually felt as if I'd been to the moon with these men. And what I especially liked about this was the authenticity of it. So these are the actual words of the actual astronauts who went to the moon for the first time. And there's something quite powerful and emotional in knowing that. So those are the kinds of ideas and inspirations that led us to the Life 100 Years Ago project. This is the Twitter feed for it. And what you're looking at here is a combined feed of tweets by several different diarists around New Zealand and a news source. So they're all direct quotes, like the Apollo 11 transcripts. And they're being tweeted 100 years later to the day. So it's currently the 26th of November, 1913, in their world. And the tool that we're using for this main group channel is called GroupTweet, which effectively lets you automatically bring together a whole lot of different Twitter accounts into one combined feed or storyline. So I've got the really easy job because that's the feed that I'm responsible for. If you're familiar with Twitter, you'll see that there's an attribution there. So that's the Viya Adkin Diary, which to Twitter users says, this tweet came from someone else. So behind the scenes, I've connected up Adkin Diary to the GroupTweet and told it that every time Adkin Diary tweets, using a particular hashtag, that we should stream that through the Life 100 Years Ago stream. I'm not going to keep going into the mechanics of GroupTweet, but it is a very handy tool for bringing together lots of voices into a single stream. So the idea is that you can follow the Life 100 Years Ago stream to read across a whole lot of different perspectives on the same day in history, or you can just follow the individuals who are part of it to create your own combination of voices, or you can just choose to follow one perspective or a character for want of a better term. So in terms of who we've currently got tweeting, bearing in mind that it's 1913 and the First World War hasn't started, this is Leslie Adkin. He's 25 and desperately courting his lady, Love Maud. He doesn't go to the war. And his Twitter feed is run by Te Papa, so Kirsty's going to talk a little bit more about how that works in a minute. Bert's 37. He's Leslie's uncle, and he does go off to the war, but his family keep his diary on his beharful. He's away. So his diary had already been transcribed by on the Kete Hordafenoa at Te Takari in Levin, but his Twitter stream is actually run by somebody down in Wellington. Frederick Welch is 47 and owns a land agency business. He's being run by the Wired Upper Archive. And this is our oldest tweeter, James Cox, run by the Alexander Turnbull Library. And he's around 67 years old and he's a labourer. And Roy Bruce joined us last month, run by the University of Canterbury. So he's our first letter writer, which has caused some interesting challenges around keeping his, what he's saying, aligned with the actual date that he's saying it on. And he's also our first soldier. So he goes to Gallipoli twice, as well as a number of other battles. So you can see that they're all real people tweeting in their own voices. And I've actually had countless conversations with people about the idea of creating fictionalised characters representing different points of view because obviously it's very difficult to get sources representing the women's perspective. And I think that would make a really great project. But when I did the math on how much resource it would take to script the characters, to research their storylines, to consider the, I guess, the narrative arc of how it would work, this just seemed a whole lot simpler. And I think arguably just as effective. And finally, we've also got a feed of newspaper headlines, which is being run by the National Library of New Zealand. So this is really helpful because each day they tweet the date so that helps us position in time. So you can see it's a very collaborative project. Currently around, I need to update the slide, 330 people follow that group stream. But more importantly, we get a lot of retweeting and engagement, not in the sense of our characters or our people talk back to them, but a lot of people talk to them. We haven't actually done much publicity for the project yet. And so while that number of followers is low, I know that each and every one of those people who's following the stream want to receive the content. So there's none of that. I follow your brand, you follow my brand going on. And you can also see there that on most of the tweets, there's a link that you can follow through to read the full diary or newspaper article. And occasionally there are photographs. So we're encouraging that discovery of online heritage sources as well. But this isn't compulsory. So we want readers to have a meaningful experience, even if what they read is only on Twitter. The deep dive is an optional thing if you're setting up a stream. So what I'm going to do now is hand over to Kirsty, who's going to talk a little bit more in depth about what it's like to be a contributor to the project from Te Papa's point of view. And then I'll come back and make a few concluding statements. So Kirsty and Adrian Kingston, who you heard from earlier this morning, were really key partners in helping us set up this project and figuring out how it was all going to work. So I'm very grateful to both of them. Thanks Virginia. So as Virginia mentioned, George Leslie Adkin is one of the chaps you encounter when you go to life 100 years ago. He began tweeting on the 31st of March by proxy this year. And since then he's posted almost 220 tweets. And this is his Twitter stream. So tweeting Leslie allows Te Papa, which as Virginia mentioned is Adrian and I, to do three main things. It gives us the chance to experiment with new ways of presenting and interpreting our collections. It allows us to show what everyday life was like in New Zealand in the year leading up to and during the war. And it means that we are participating in an innovative project from the outset, which we hope will inspire others to get involved. So I might be Leslie's tweet puppeteer, but who was he really? And why is he participating in this project? Well, Leslie Adkin was born in 1888. After attending Wellington College, he went to work on his father's farm near Levin. He kept diaries from 1905 until his death in 1964 and Te Papa holds all 40 of these diaries. And in them Leslie describes family and farm life, community and church events, the local landscape and occasionally his emotions. Leslie was also an amateur photographer and scholar who made important contributions to New Zealand science. And many of his photographs are also into Papa's collections. So the year leading up to the war was an eventful one for Leslie. In 1913, he was captivated by HMS New Zealand, what he called a grim and formidable fighting machine that New Zealanders donated to the Royal Navy. In November, Leslie also served as a special constable during the Great Strike. Age 26, when the war broke out, Leslie did not volunteer to fight. He thought that the Kaiser was quite mad and predicted that thousands would meet their death in the conflict. Leslie's younger brother, Gilbert, seen here was one of more than 18,000 New Zealanders who gave their lives for King and Country. Instead of signing up, Leslie spent the war years securing his financial situation, which he did by leasing and working on a section of his father's farm. And here's a spoiler alert. This was so that he could marry and support Maude Hurd, who had met in 1909 and they were married at the end of 1915. The couple's daughter was born in 1916 and their son in 1918, just as the Spanish flu was hitting its stride and just before the armistice. Although Leslie did manage to get down and to live in to photograph the celebrations. So that's a very quick overview of the content of the diaries. I'd like to talk now about the nuts and bolts of transforming the diaries, which have their own historically contingent meaning and integrity as primary sources into a meaningful reading experience as part of a multi-voiced Twitter stream. And for convenience, I'm starting with Leslie's entry 100 years ago today. And if you're reading it, you'll note that the entry is a little downbeat. I suspect that Leslie is missing the thrill of being a strike breaker in Wellington and Maude, who had recently moved up to Hastings with her family. And you'll see that the entry is part of Tupapa's collections online database, not the Life 100 years ago Twitter stream. And presenting the content here is an important intermediary step we take in making the diaries tweetable. This is where we park individual digitised and transcribed entries. We catalogue them and then choose our tweets. Parking the content here in this form gives us flexibility and options to repurpose the diaries in the future. I guess it gives us the most bang for our buck. But for now and crucially, working in this way enables readers to access the life and times of Leslie Adkin in different ways. The transcriptions and tweets are interdependent, but each version can be enjoyed and comprehended as a standalone experience. And that's the source of all of our content and individual digitised diary entry. And here's just another example, an earlier diary entry. That was much easier to tweet. And this is how it appeared on the Life 100 years ago Twitter stream amongst the other tweets. And here's an entry from September, which shows how we combine Leslie's photographs with his diary entries. And as Virginia mentioned, some of the photos can be and have been tweeted. So tweeting historical texts is at the centre of this project. And I can't really give you a fail-safe guide to tweeting the past. The beauty of this project is that it can be adapted according to your content, to your institutions and paratifs and the resources that you have to hand. But having said this, here briefly is the process that Adrian and I have developed for Life 100 years ago. For the sake of efficiency, we try to work in batches of a month at a time. I select a month's worth of tweets and then drop them into a tweet sheet devised by Adrian. And you can see a portion of the sheet in the screen here. This formats the tweets into a sequence of characters and spaces that enables us to use an automatic scheduler. And Hootsuite is what we've chosen to use to upload the content into Leslie's Twitter stream and consequently into Life 100 years ago. And I'm sure Adrian can correct or elaborate on this. Working in this way allows me to read the tweets as a narrative sequence. Now remember that this is not a spontaneous real-time tweeting. It is a contrived and artificial situation and you are manufacturing story arcs and drama. And I tend to treat Leslie's life like a miniature soap opera that some people will tune into religiously every day while others will come and go. Therefore it has to draw in, amuse and move both types of readers. Some stories are rolled out over several episodes like the courtship of Mord while some are short-lived. Others are played for laughs or to peak curiosity. And I have found it helpful that as a history curator I write exhibition text according to very strict word limits. It was therefore a relatively short-leap from explaining the Great Depression in 150 words to summing up a day in the life of Leslie in 140 characters. I also know from my own behaviour that people read selectively and idiosyncratically on the web. And this meant I was prepared to rethink what a narrative experience of the diaries might be. And before I hand this back to Virginia I just want to make a confession that I'm not really a digital native and for others of you like me who sometimes see tweeting as an alien way to communicate be not afraid. From my recent experience it has been worth adding Twitter to the suite of tools I use to present and interpret the past. And it's actually because we know that Twitter isn't everybody's cup of tea and that actually a lot of schools don't let their students use social media during class time that we're also pulling all of those tweets into the portal for the centenary which is www.100.govt.nz. And I think reflecting back on the short duration of the project so far the most challenging thing for me personally has been the sense of being out of control of the user experience. I don't know what Kirsty's going to tweet on a given day or what Gareth and the Wired Up is going to tweet but then at the same time I kind of think that's the way Twitter is we're a group of individual voices randomly brought together to create some sort of collective commentary on our existence and everybody's been doing such a great job and I'm so grateful to them. So the website is where we can also provide a little bit more context for what's happening in the SOAP Opera as Kirsty's referred to it including links as you can see there to the Ministry's NZ History website and we also provide information about each of the contributors if you want to find out more about them so that the diaries, diarists and guidelines for participating in the project as well as an archive so if you want to go back back in time you can do that. So what we've shown you this morning is really just the start I guess aiming to keep these voices going through right until 2018 eventually sharing what it's like to be a New Zealander during the war and the project is open to anybody to participate in and I guess what we're hoping is that schools in the public start to get interested in the centenary they might also want to join in with diaries or memorabilia that they have in their possession although from earlier experience I may seem like I'm not the right audience for this story, I'm going to be too emotional I am very excited about the potential of this it's going to take I think a little bit of coordination to get everybody linked up together but I think it'll be an incredible way to get a sense of what the impact of the First World War was on those people from the past who at once you know completely different and at the same time not very different from us at all they go to work, they fall in love they take photographs, they spend time with their families and right now despite all of them this year having commented on the visit of the HMS New Zealand battleship to Wellington they really have no idea what's on their horizon so thank you very much for listening and we're very happy to take any questions Oliver's got a microphone out there any questions, anyone? I'd like to congratulate Virginia on the emotion she showed I think as someone halfway to 100 the World War I brings back very evocative memories for all of us in this room and I think the next five years are going to be quite a roller coaster for us. Any questions? Just a reminder the hashtag here is NDFNZ, quite simple NDFNZ for those new to Twitter question over here. Let's imagine I was at an institution where I was using Twitter but the history curators were somewhat technophobic this is just a thought experiment we might have some excellent World War I diaries and they may have even expressed some desire to do something with them on the web how difficult would it be for novices to be I guess scaffolded or eased into the process and how much time and input would be required from someone like me who might be helping them It's an interesting question because you're sort of describing Kirstie in a way That's why I asked so your diaries aren't digitised yet there's nothing online yet? No I guess you've got two choices there so you can either choose just to learn Twitter which is a reasonably simple tool and tweet without digitising or to digitise and put them online which there are a variety of levels to which you can go doing that you can go quite resource heavy like te Papa have but they have an established infrastructure for doing digitisation like that or so Gareth winter up at the wider archive is just digitising page by page and putting them on a simple blog platform which is free I think it te Papa you had the advantage of having a tech angel in the form of Adrian who took care of the tweeting while the history curator took care of the content selection So I'm really lucky I can focus on the kind of curatorial side of the project and also some of the grant work I've transcribed March to December of the diaries this year I'm hoping not to transcribe the next five years we're looking into crowdsourcing and have a graduate student to help us with that this summer and I chose the tweets but the twitter's not that hard I've watched a lot of people over the past five years join twitter and find it's okay and I can help you out it's a lot of fun thank you thanks very much for opening up a few lives for us to get to know in those diaries ladies thanks very much everyone