Abstract
The CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive is a Digital Humanities project to preserve images, stories, and media about the earthquakes of 2010/2011, for the purposes of commemoration, teaching, and research. CEISMIC helps facilitate understanding of the effects of major natural disasters on communities and cultural heritage, but such archives risk failure if they limit access, lack visibility, or fail to produce research outcomes. Drawing on the experience of creating CEISMIC, the authors explain that a free and open access federated archive, committed to underpinning research, repurposing material, creating new knowledge, and forging links with similar efforts internationally, has been the key to CEISMIC’s longevity. They also candidly assess reasons why the project has not realised its full potential in the years following the disaster.
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Notes
- 1.
Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) defines and maps the Residential Red Zone on their website. See http://www.linz.govt.nz/crown-property/types-crown-property/christchurch-residential-red-zone/residential-red-zone-areas
- 2.
The current list of CEISMIC consortium members is at http://www.ceismic.org.nz/consortium
- 3.
DigitalNZ is funded by the New Zealand government to connect people to digital material from libraries, museums, government departments, publicly funded organisations, the media, and community groups. It calls itself ‘the search engine for New Zealand culture.’ See http://digitalnz.org/about
- 4.
- 5.
Details of the University of Canterbury’s Digital Humanities offerings are available at http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/arts/schools-and-departments/digital-arts-social-sciences-and-humanities/
- 6.
For the Canterbury District Health Board archives, visit https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/collection/599 and https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/collection/818
- 7.
We discuss the complex issues around social media in relation to cultural heritage disaster archives in more detail in Smithies et al. 2015, pp. 32–33.
- 8.
Material from the conference held to share research suported by the CEISMIC contestable fund is archived at https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/collection/456
- 9.
For the NZILBB page on the QuakeBox, see http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/nzilbb/research/variation. For the CEISMIC QuakeBox archive, see https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/collection/235
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Millar, P., Thomson, C., Smithies, J., Middendorf, J. (2019). The Challenge, the Project, and the Politics: Lessons from Six Years of the UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive. In: Bouterey, S., Marceau, L. (eds) Crisis and Disaster in Japan and New Zealand. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0244-2_10
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