Quakes' many stories to go on the record
PHILIP MATTHEWS
Think of the National Library in Wellington as New Zealand's memory, storing and sorting and helping to make sense of great and terrible events.
Christchurch's sequence of earthquakes must rank as the most terrible in our history, or at least come close. And since September, the National Library has been just one of the government agencies working quietly but steadily to amass an earthquake archive.
What will its quake archive look like? As associate chief librarian Ronald Milne explains, there are several components.
First up, the Canterbury Earthquakes 2010-2011 diary oral history project. This involves regular in-depth interviews with more than 20 Cantabrians, dealing with the earthquake experience and tracking the effects on their lives and work.
"Participants are drawn from those who are or were living in the most affected areas, and those involved in the initial response to the earthquakes, as well as the recovery and rebuilding in the region," Milne says.
Oral historian Hugo Manson began interviewing his selected group in October 2010 and will continue until June 2012. The recordings and documents will then be deposited into the oral history collection of the National Library's Alexander Turnbull Library. Future access will depend on agreements with the interview subjects.
Also on the ground in Christchurch is photographer Ross Becker documenting the post-quake recovery. A Wellingtonian, Becker was originally commissioned in September for a finite period; since the February quakes, the job has been extended until at least June 2012.
So far he has taken more than 5000 high-resolution photos that Milne says are being loaded into the National Digital Heritage Archive, where they will be held in perpetuity. They are available through Timeframes, the library's online database.
About 40 per cent of the photos are available at low resolution to the public under a Creative Commons Licence at Becker's online Picasa album. They are beautiful shots of a horrible subject.
The National Library's information gathering also includes the regular "harvesting" of almost 70 earthquake- related websites, including pages from official sites, blogs, business, community and fundraising websites. Material published on old-fashioned paper is also collected by Christchurch staff of the National Library, including such "earthquake-related ephemera" as posters, red stickers, programmes from memorial services and fundraising concerts.
All of this archival work involves librarians, photographers and researchers heading out into the field on traditional hunting and gathering trips. But another, more recent initiative from another Wellington government department, provides for some local interaction.
Last week, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage launched a web project called Quake Stories. There was no fanfare, just a few mentions on social media sites such as Twitter. In the marketing world, you would call it a soft launch.
But word soon got around. The site went live on a Friday. By the following Monday, there were some 20 stories on the site, all added by those who had experienced the quakes. And more are appearing all the time.
The elegant and very user-friendly web design by the Wellington arm of Christchurch's NV Interactive invites you to tell your story or browse those left by others. Be warned that they can draw you straight back into the terrifying moment: "I could hear the children screaming in the classrooms. I kept calling out 'turtle turtle' like we'd practised but they were too scared to remember what to do."
The idea came after the February quake. One of the ministry's roles is to write history, creating references and websites, such as the online encyclopedia Te Ara. Staff realised soon that this was one of the most major events in New Zealand history, if not the biggest, says Jamie Mackay, a web team leader.
The notion was to create a website with a more official status than some that popped up soon after the quake, to compile "a permanent record of how people were feeling and what they were saying at the time".
There were overseas models - in particular, lasting web archives collecting stories after the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina - but the ministry has also set up online oral history web projects on Vietnam veterans and the 28th Maori Battalion. Like those war stories, these first drafts are "raw material for what will become the historical record", Mackay says.
Time changes the way material is gathered. Take Gallipoli, Napier and Erebus as precedents. Surely the sheer abundance of media and the ease of use means that there are opportunities to create a historical record that other events have lacked.
"Napier's interesting," Mackay says. "Even the reporters at the time didn't record personal accounts. They might have reported what their experience was. Really, the only record, apart from the odd memoir and so on, is oral history that was done 50 years after the event.
"And with Erebus there were no survivors. One of our historians did a very detailed web project on Erebus and it was amazing how much was missing from the record. She found it hard to reconstruct how the disaster was reported on the night because TVNZ had not kept that footage in the archives."
There is no shortage of media coverage of the Christchurch quakes. But the most immediate material might also be the most ephemeral: the texts and emails and Facebook and Twitter postings that went out in the moments after the worst shakes.
This falls slightly outside the Quake Stories remit, but Mackay understands that, in the case of Twitter, it will be possible to recover all the tweets that used the earthquake hashtags. He expects researchers from Canterbury University's new Ceismic project will do just that.
Facebook will be harder because its messages are not public: "It is going to come down to someone doing the grunt work of contacting individuals who they know have information on their Facebook page and getting their permission to use it."
Speaking of grunt work, Mackay is thinking of ways to get quake stories out of Cantabrians. "An idea I had, and I'm not sure if it would get wheels, but for example getting schools to get their students to do projects on their family's experience of the quake and getting their parents' permission to record their emails or their tweets or even their texts, and do those as packages."
Mackay agrees that one problem will be the freshness of memory.
"It's already hard for people to remember if something happened after the June quake or the February quake.
"Whenever I go down to Christchurch, or talk to Christchurch friends, they always say they are getting on with their lives and don't think about the earthquake so much now, but as soon as I open up the topic, half an hour later they're still talking about it. I think it's just tapping into that somehow and getting people to get over the hurdle of actually writing it down."
Ultimately, these initiatives, as well as the Christchurch City Libraries- supported Kete Christchurch project, will come under the umbrella of something called the Ceismic consortium. This is one archive to rule them all, run from Canterbury University. If the others are memory, this is the brain.
The official launch is still some weeks away but Paul Millar, an associate professor in the College of Arts, can give some sense of what is involved. Essentially, Canterbury will build up a unique archive of quake experiences.
You might remember that in the weeks after the February quake, there was discussion about the university becoming an international centre of earthquake studies. Most assumed that meant fields like engineering and geology. But Millar had another idea.
While in Wellington for a fortnight after the quake, he wondered: what can a professor of English do to help? He was directed to the George Mason University's 9/11 project - the same one that the Ministry for Culture and Heritage looked at. He saw that it has become the international go-to centre for 9/11 researchers.
"It occurred to me that we could do something very similar here at Canterbury. We've got all the geotechnical expertise, we've got all the engineering expertise, but the quakes are primarily about the impact on people. Once you've got all the information on the earth science, and once you've rebuilt Christchurch, you're still looking at torn- apart families and communities that could take decades to repair.
"I thought it would be important to record people's stories and to capture as many media files as possible and also chart the process of the recovery. Do longitudinal studies, keep going back to people and find out how they are getting on. Chart patterns of migration and do geospatial mapping.
"We're a very unfortunate ideal test case. Christchurch is in a very geographically defined area. We're relatively first world so we have a high technology uptake. The impact has gone across all the social strata."
As we speak, all sorts of potential study topics are occurring to him. You could pull out data on how disasters affect animals. You could do a study of disaster ethics, which has been a surprisingly unexamined area: "When you go to see damaged buildings, is it voyeurism or is it grief therapy?"
He has hired a team leader who will be a senior lecturer in digital humanities. Teaching courses will be built around the material. There will be funds for related research.
There could be longitudinal studies and geospatial mapping. In other words, how do perceptions change over time and how did location affect experience?
There are still further details to finalise, Millar says, but the ultimate vision will have the Ceismic consortium collating information from a range of sources and creating a scholarly archive as well as a memorial website. Incidentally, Ceismic is an acronym: the Canterbury Earthquakes Images, Stories and Media Integrated Collection.
Like Jamie Mackay, Paul Millar is concerned about getting the immediate, post-quake stories. For him, it is those emails dashed off soon after, perhaps as a bulletin going out to family and friends all over the world.
In the weeks and months that followed, people have constructed a clear narrative, shaped by repeated telling. But the emails were raw and direct.
"I had students email me after the quake and some of them were tremendously moving. They did order events, but they were also very raw. It's different to the narrative you order later when you try to make sense of events."
WEB ADDRESSES
* Low resolution copies of Ross Becker's photos: picasaweb.google.com/ RossBeckerNZ
* The Ministry for Culture and Heritage's Quake Stories: quakestories.govt.nz
* Another story-collecting site, Kete Christchurch: ketechristchurch. peoplesnetworknz.info/canterburyâ€" earthquakesâ€"2010â€"2011
* The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank in the US, a model for Quake Stories:hurricanearchive.org/
* The influential online archive of 9/11 stories: 911digitalarchive.org/ index.php
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