Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund

Exploring the vā and lā of Aotearoa’s climate journalism

Tara Ross

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2024

This project explores Aotearoa’s climate journalism to gauge how well it accounts for Pacific understandings of interconnected space and relationships. The scholarship relating to climate journalism and media coverage of the climate crisis in the Pacific comprises several key threads, mostly about roles and responsibilities, media framing and representation, and the importance of incorporating Indigenous voices and perspectives into climate discourse. Little of this work has been done by Pacific scholars (these are mostly dominant western accounts) and there is a need for media research that is grounded in Pacific perspectives and worldviews.

This study looks toward filling that gap by exploring climate journalism in Aotearoa through Pacific frameworks of vā and lā – relationships/relationality and shared ocean space – and an understanding of a collective Moana. It examines the ways in which Aotearoa news media understand and report the climate crisis in Pacific terms and/or serve the interests of Moana peoples more widely. In what ways do they represent Pacific perspectives and advocate for Pacific interests in their reporting? And how does their work connect and square with Pacific climate discourses in other spaces?

Tracking the Development of the Paipera Tapu through the 19th Century

Forrest Panther and Joshua Wilson-Black

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2024

The first printing press arrived in Aotearoa in 1834. There was printed Māori text even before this time but the arrival of a printing press precipitated the large-scale printing of literature in Māori.

Much Māori text of the 19^th century is not currently digitized in a way that is machine-readable. There are images and PDF documents, but attempts at OCR often produce mistakes. This is due to the quality of the scans, the combination of different font sizes and styles that is often difficult for OCR tools to handle, and a printing process that often produces incomplete characters. Further complications include the fact that OCR tools often make use of predictive tools based on English, rather than Māori. Accurate OCR for te reo Māori, which is sensitive to a range of historical usages and local dialectal variation, is vital for the historical disciplines in Aotearoa.

This project systematically investigates and attempts to improve the performance of OCR algorithms for use with 19^th Century documents in te reo Māori.

Criminalisation and Deportation of Pacific Peoples by New Zealand and Australia

Lin Mussell and Josephine Varghese

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2024

Last year, a harrowing incident unfolded in Auckland when authorities forcibly removed a construction worker and “overstayer” from his residence in the presence of his terrified children. This event resonates with historical injustices, such as the Dawn Raids targeting Pacific Peoples between 1974-1976 and the enactment of the Pacific Islander Labourers Act of 1901 in Australia, which mandated the mass deportation of Pacific Peoples in Australia. Despite being invited to address labour shortages in New Zealand (NZ) and Australia, Pacific Peoples endure heightened scrutiny from law enforcement and immigration authorities, leading to imprisonment and deportation.

This project will create a corpus of social media content published 2022-24 by select NZ and Australian actors, which is inclusive of one year preceding and following the ‘official end’ of the COVID-19 emergency. It draws on corpus-assisted discourse analysis techniques to comparatively analyse narratives about labour, detention, and deportation of Pacific Peoples across borders.

Image: New moon over Auckland at dawn. Jin Koo Niersbach. CC BY 2.0

The possibilities of Big Podcast Data

Zita Joyce

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2024

It’s 20 years since Ben Hammersley, writing in The Guardian, coined the term ‘podcasts’ as a portmanteau of ipod and broadcast to describe a new form of audio blogging using RSS feeds. Now Listen Notes, a podcast database company, identifies that there are more than 193,139,807 podcast episodes on the internet.

For these 20 years, academic research on podcasts tends to be small-scale and qualitative, using textual analysis, interviews, and occasional surveys to explore things like narrative, journalistic strategies, advertising, and audiences.  There seems to be a very big gap in the academic literature on large scale analysis of podcast trends, though it should be possible, given that there are so many extant episodes, and all require standardised metadata to be indexed by podcast apps.

This project explores the possibilities of a) accessing / scraping large scale podcast metadata, and b) generating useful insights from it. This work will contribute to larger scale understandings of how podcasts have developed over 20 years and make methodological contributions to the field. 

Image: bettnet, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Empowering Indigenous Narratives: An Exploration of Video Games for Historical and Cultural Education

Chia-rong Wu

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2024

This project revolves around the representation of Indigenous people and their rich history and culture in video games as a means of fostering historical and cultural education. It embarks on a substantial study that provides a broad perspective on the portrayal of Indigenous customs and practices across different cultural contexts. It thus offers insights into the common themes and unique approaches employed in representing Indigeneity.

The overarching aim is to shed light on the pivotal role that video games play in empowering Indigenous narratives and serving as educational tools for preserving and sharing cultural heritage and enhancing the visibility of Indigeneity in the digital world. These games serve as prime examples of how digital media can be utilised to showcase Indigenous stories, traditions, and values in an engaging and interactive format. By critically analysing the representation of Indigenous subjects in video games, this project aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on cultural diversity and inclusivity in video gaming.

Mapping Public Lectures and Debates in 19th Century Christchurch Through Digitised Historical Newspapers

Joshua Wilson Black

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2023

This project maps public lectures and debates in 19^th century Christchurch, by applying a variety of text analytic methods to historical newspaper advertisements to extract the ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘what’ of these events and produce a public facing interactive visualisation. Unlocking this information from historical newspapers will be a significant contribution to both New Zealand history and to the emerging field of experimental history of philosophy.

This project contributes to the ADL’s ongoing work on Papers Past newspaper content. The investigation of workflows for OCR improvement is particularly important for future work as OCR errors are a significant limit on the success of text analytic methods.  

2013-2023 Electoral Immigration Detention Discourse in Aotearoa, Australia, and the UK

Lin Mussell and Sian Troath

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2023

Immigration detention is a contested topic mobilized during elections to shore up political support and votes. These discourses reveal assumptions, values, and norms on the part of politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, and community stakeholders about social risk and deservingness. These discourses have real world impacts through policy decisions and on the lived reality of migrants.

This research project is creating a corpus of immigration detention discourse, drawing on corpus-assisted discourse analysis techniques to comparatively analyse narratives about immigration detention, specifically risk and deservingness; track how such narratives are transferred across borders (policy learning); and pin-point how narratives are reflected in subsequent policy.

Image: Takver, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Taniwha: A Cultural History – Digital Corpus Analysis

Kirsty Dunn and Madi Williams

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2023

This project asks “who” rather than “what” are taniwha?  To whom are they related and how? Are there connections between taniwha narratives? What kinds of knowledge are embedded in these narratives? And how might taniwha narratives help us to understand and navigate current conflicts and challenges that are present both here in Aotearoa and beyond? 

We are building and analysing a digital corpus to assess and address ways in which taniwha have been represented in pūrākau, literature, visual art, news media, and a range of digital and web-based source material.  

Exploring digital approaches to film studies at UC

Erin Harrington

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2023

Over the last fifteen years, researchers in film studies and associated visual analysis fields have been exploring the use of digital and computational tools in novel ways. One strand of inquiry, based more in film and arts practice, is how the creation of videographic essays might be a form of research and meaning-making itself, as well as a mode of dissemination and a pedagogical approach. Another is how digital tools might open up new ways of thinking about film as object and artefact. Approaches are almost staggering in their diversity.

This scoping project thus aims to understand what digital approaches to film studies might look like at UC – practically, ethically, creatively. The aims of this research project are broad, and are intended as first steps towards a better understanding of this field in our context.

Image: Archives New Zealand, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Imperial reinforcements: MI7b propaganda in New Zealand and the Dominions during the First World War

David Monger

Faculty of Arts Digital Research Seed Fund Project 2023

During 1917 and 1918, a newly established branch of British military intelligence, MI7b, recruited a collection of more than 20 talented writers from the ranks of the army to write propaganda for circulation to newspapers in Britain and its imperial Dominions (Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa). Among the recruits were such prominent authors as the fantasy writers Lord Dunsany and H.R. Wakefield, the humourist J.B. Morton, the Irish author Patrick MacGill and the journalist and author A.J. Dawson, as well as the internationally-renowned post-war children’s author, A.A. Milne.

This project aims to expand the exploration of digital newspaper repositories, by seeking further pieces by Milne and other MI7b propagandists. The research will shine new light on Britain’s self-promotion to itself and its Dominions during the war, and increase knowledge of British propaganda activities in Aotearoa.