Compiling the digital stories of extreme weather and earthquake impacts to Māori cultural infrastructures

Kia ora koutou, nau mai!

The whakahura-waipake repository compiles Sally Owen's work to date of scraping and encoding korero (stories) of extreme weather and earthquake impacts in Aotearoa New Zealand which impacted our indigenous cultural infrastructures.

Digital NZ resources produced by sets of search terms (e.g. marae+flooding) are harvested by an R programme, which encodes these results into either R dataframes or in RDF using the JSON serialisation format.

This map of sources includes tags for whether a resource has been quality-assured by a human (to check the story is indeed regarding disaster damage to cultural infrastructures).

Linked.art ontology (from the cultural heritage space) will eventually be used for the RDF encoding, using JSON-LD. The RDF will be loaded into a TripleStor for quality-assurance and then SPARKL query.

This project was catalysed during discussion between Sally and Dr Shaun Awatere, Vision Mātauranga leader of the Whakahura: Extreme Weather Events and the Emergence of Climate Change research project, funded by Hīkina Whakatutuki: the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. Credit also to Vision Mātauranga team members Dr John Reid & Dr Matt Rout, as well as Prof Ilan Noy, for support, and encouragement, advice and guidance. Earthquake damages were also included, after discussion and support from Prof. Noy through QuakeCoRE.