Fantastic Futures 2024 - Day 1 - Session 3

This transcript was generated by NFSA Bowerbird and may contain errors.

Was it a plane crash, a bushfire, or the outbreak of nuclear war? Horrible thought. No, it wasn't. It was the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, which lit up the sky with a red glow last night and prompted a flood of telephone calls from panicky onlookers in both northern New Zealand and Australia. Mary Fennec reports. The callers said it looked like fire in the sky or red rain dripping down. The unearthly glow was visible in Hamilton and Tauranga too, but for once it was Aucklanders who had the best view of the display emanating from the South Pole. Physics professor David Whitehead says the aurora was caused by solar activity last week. The largest ever recorded solar flare, 36 times the size of the Earth, was observed last Thursday. Tēnā tātou katoa tēnei te mihi atu ki a tātou e hoihoe mai nei. Tūatahi ka tika me mihi atu ki ngā tāngata o tēnei whenua, the Ngālawha people. Ka mihi tēnei uri no Taranaki maunga no Aotearoa ki a koutou katoa, o te rā ki a tātou katoa e hoihoe mai nei ki rungi tēnei I wanted to start this presentation with a piece from our collection. And this particular clip spoke to me because not only does it show a connection between Aotearoa and our unaunga here in Australia, but it also speaks for me personally to what we're trying to do as an archive of audiovisual collections and where we want to go. I remember shortly after there were some devastating floods on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand about 18 months ago, and I remember Paul Thompson, who's the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of our national radio station, RNZ, talking about AM radio. And for context, during the floods, the only piece of technology that kept on working to connect people with communication was the AM radio network. And Paul said in one of our meetings, the AM radio is a sunset industry, but oh, what a glorious sunset. And that, for me, embodies some of the things that I think about our world and how our world's changing. And the link between we have a lot of sunset technology going on at the moment, But if we were also to think about what does it look like after sunset, and I sort of feel like we're in the aurora phase at the moment, where often you can't see what's happening with the naked eye. But if you take out your camera, if you look through the lens of technology, you can see these amazing colors and this amazing glow after sunset. And so what I'm going to talk about in this talk is our aurora moment, and leading us into the next sunrise. So just for a little bit of context, my name obviously is Honiana Love, that was up on the screen earlier. And I am the CEO at Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, which is the national audiovisual archive for Aotearoa, for New Zealand. Ngā Taonga in te reo Māori means the treasures or the treasured items. And our purpose, as we talk about it now, is to preserve and hold New Zealand's audiovisual heritage and safekeeping and make it widely accessible. I'm going to dig into that a little bit further on in the talk, where what you'll hear in the talk is how nuanced that statement is about what our role is. So, our big aim is, I think, the same as heritage institutions around the world, to build stronger connections between New Zealanders, their heritage, through the work that we do. So our collection is in ballpark of 800,000 items. It's not a huge collection, dating back to 1894 and includes film, television, sound, and radio recordings, including, of course, the recordings from Te Heku media from Peter Lucas's fabulous organisation and I'll also talk more to our journey alongside Te Heku because I think that the connections are really important in telling our story. We were established in 1981 as the New Zealand Film Archive and in 2012 and 2014 we took in the collections from our national broadcasters, Radio New Zealand, Television New Zealand, as well as some of the collections created through Māori television over time, through our iwi radio stations and other radio stations. So we have a collection that has in it a strong influence from the Crown and the authorising environment created by the Government, but also a lot of private collections. We're funded through the Crown. but we are actually an independent charitable trust. I think one of the really important things, and where I'm going to just take this slight detour into talking about what that means in a New Zealand context, because of course we have a treaty, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, In fact, we have two treaties, according to some people, but our focus, of course, is the one written in Te Reo Māori. So, our constitution, as an independent charitable trust, our constitution is not, we're not a Crown agency. But early on in our history, the people who we were working with told us how important it was for us to understand and be an ally in the treaty space. Now when I say that we're an ally, we are very much trying to do the crown's work in being a good treaty partner. So we're not trying to position ourselves as having any any role in representing iwi and hapu, the tribes of New Zealand. We were very much trying to help the Crown to meet its obligations on the side of the Treaty. And that's been embedded into our constitution. So we're one of the few organisations in Aotearoa that has a bicultural mandate and a bicultural board. So our board is six members and half of them must be Māori. So that has given us a really strong values base and that really sits at the heart of all the work that we do and I think what I talk about next will is basically trying to bring to life those values that were really embedded into our organisation in that early work that was done around Te Tiriti o Waitangi being a foundation for us as an organisation as well as us as a country I have to hold this clicker in just the right place So, I'm going to go back to some of the things that Peter Lucas raised this morning because his session, I think, really spoke to how we need to work together with indigenous communities to strengthen the work that they're doing. We have a close working relationship with Te Hiku, as Peter Lucas spoke to this morning. And we're extremely excited about the work that Te Hiku are doing around the papareo. And we were one of the early testers of the Māori transcription tool. And we see that work as really being able to feed into where we're going. One of the things that we believe is that our records should be catalogued in the language that they were spoken in, and we've built that model into what we're doing, particularly with our Te Reo Māori collections. We're not so great on other languages, but we're hoping other countries we'll build the models that we can use to transcribe or catalogue those records from other countries. So with Te Hiku, recently we worked with Te Hiku and Radio New Zealand to feed some of our large corpus of spoken te reo Māori into their machine, which we're hoping, we're expecting, will really help build that tool. And all the things that we've been listening to this morning have helped us to understand exactly how that works and the difference that that's going to make. The other thing about ngā taonga, just to give you a little bit of background, is that we don't own the bulk of our collection, so everything that we do must be discussed with depositors and the owners of the material, the copyright holders, but also, and this is probably where a particular focus for us, is with kaitiaki. Now kaitiaki is a term, you can see here the framework that we're using is a term that I think one of my cousins described it as we at Ngā Taonga are the holders of this material. We look after its physical well-being and our work is to make it accessible. But the spiritual and cultural well-being of the material in our collections belongs to kaitiaki. So when we talk about kaitiaki, we're talking about those people for whom the content is their kōrero and the things that Peter Lucas was talking to this morning about actually who speaks for the taonga. And in our case, the kaitiaki are the people that speak for the taonga. So we've been thinking a lot over the last few years about how do we make that happen in practice. And this is the Te Akina framework that we came up with, the way to actually put into practice our belief that we cannot speak for these collections in terms of how the content should be shared with others. Sorry, just catching up with my notes. So as part of our commitment, we work closely with iwi, with the various tribes, to identify and establish these kaitiaki relationships, reconnect them with identified viable people and places in the taonga. When we talk about data as land, I remember very early on in my time at the film archive that was, previous organization, Tu Ngā Taonga, had this old lady come in, this kuia, and she was watching this film of a plane taking off, it's called The Fisher Monoplane, and she was crying, and I went over to her and I said, kuia, could you tell me a little bit about what's going on here? And she said, you see that hill in the background behind where the plane's taking off? I said, yep. She said, it's been completely quarried away. This is the only image I've seen of that sacred hill. And suddenly, there's a whole different meaning to this film for these people and how it should be used. So our commitment is that we work with Kaitiaki to ensure culturally appropriate use and to make sure that they're comfortable with the use. So we had an example, we've got a film of Te Puea Hirangi. She comes from the line of the Kingitanga, the king movement in Aotearoa. and she was walking through the fields and she was sowing seeds and there was a whole line of people next to her and they were all sowing seeds and a company wanted, and with very good well-meaning practice, they wanted to take her image and flip it so that she was walking the opposite way to her people, so that she would pop out and people would notice that it was Te Puea Hirangi. And we took it back to her people, and they said she would never have wanted that. She walked alongside her people. And they said, we understand, we'll turn it back around. So those are the sort of things that we want to achieve by connecting people. It is about identity, it is about connection, but it's also about appropriate use. So this is the framework that we use. Putting it into practice takes time, it takes a lot of energy, it takes people, it takes connection, it takes people who understand how to build those connections. So I'm not saying that it's easy, but it's also a must-have for us. I think the other thing that I think which is an area that we're starting to lean into but hasn't fully developed yet, is around the traditional knowledge labels. So actually being able to use the technology to take some of the weight of Kaitiaki having to make these decisions every time on a case-by-case basis. If they can actually, if we can build into the system in the same way that Creative Commons did, a way to change licensing so that they can actually ensure that the material is well documented, how it should be used. And in fact, the next step after that, of course, is that they can immediately change the status of something if something changes. An Australian example of that is if somebody passes away, those photos are protected for a time. So being able to do those sort of things immediately within the system is an important use of the sort of expansion of the Kaitaki framework in a way that it could be built into your systems so that it's not so time intensive for people having to respond every time to every email that you send asking for permission to do some particular thing. So we're really keen to see how those models develop. There's been some money that came through a COVID fund that has invested into traditional knowledge labels for New Zealand. making them work for us in Aotearoa because of course the original traditional knowledge labels were not developed in New Zealand and so speak to different types of restrictions and what we would want to see. So that's a little bit about what we're doing and I want to, before I jump into some of the challenges that we see coming and maybe some of the challenges that we haven't quite caught up with. I just thought I'd play you, because we're an audiovisual archive, I felt I couldn't do a presentation without having a bit of audiovisual. the migration of the Maori people from Hawai'i to New Zealand. I te te nū māori, māori, hoea, hoea rā. Ue! Hoea rā! Ue! Ka waka e! Ka ue! E te iwi e hoea rā. I te moana uiui e, hoea, hoea rā. So in the final few minutes of my presentation I just wanted to talk about some of the challenges and opportunities for the future for us and I think they'll be challenges that most heritage institutions are also thinking about. Obviously, we don't have a huge ability to build technology ourselves, and so we try to be fast followers. But where we're heading at the moment, what we're thinking about a lot at the moment is how we expand our commitment to work with communities. We think that's a place that we can really lean into to help other organisations. So, not just talking about providing access to our collections, but actually how do we support the development of community archives, of allowing communities to manage, create, curate and share their own stories, moving the balance of power away from the center and working to become an enabler of a distributed archive. We really, you know, we recognize that establishing dispersed network of community-based archives will achieve our mission of saving and protecting Aotearoa New Zealand's audiovisual heritage, even when we're not directly supplying those services ourselves. And increasingly we see the future as being trusted experts and offering specialist services that are not easily delivered by others. Our service offerings could include collecting metadata and clearing rights to make material accessible. We could support communities by providing training and specialist services not undertaken, that can't be undertaken within communities if you're thinking about communities like The community that Te Hiku Media sits in, they do a lot of this of actually supporting their community because I can tell you that the community that Peter Lucas lives in is one of our poorest. They need to be supported. So preservation of film materials are an example of that. There's no way that those sort of communities or even anybody, even in some of the biggest institutions, can afford to buy the scanners that can make these films into digital and make them more widely accessible. They don't have the resources or the people to undertake the preservation work or the specific storage needs of these films going forward when we think about nitrate collections and magnetic media This is quite a radical change from how we currently work But it doesn't change our focus on enabling all New Zealanders to access the audiovisual taonga we care for, but it builds a system that if we don't have to care for anything, we also have to find ways to support people to make it more accessible. So it changes our role. When I think about the role that technology has in this vision, I did reflect a bit on how my thinking has evolved since I became the CE at Ngā Taonga five years ago. Then I had a vision that we would have a nationally dispersed collection but that when we were thinking about things like cataloguing, we could have the opportunity for people to be cataloguing out in the regions, to be able to have jobs in their home area and they would also understand the material better than we did at the centre. So, you know, cataloguing was a big focus for me about how we were going to build those community connections. AI has changed our world again and it's changed our thinking about what that looks like. The speed at which AI can work has obvious benefits but also I can see how it might remove some of the bias, the risk of bias that's created by our work, whether it's conscious or not. It could offer a neutral record of content, and in some ways I think it could also surface more directly the voices of the tupuna, of the ancestors who are speaking. It could speak in their voice. But, you know, so thinking about that, What does it mean for the communities of origin and for our role in archiving? We have to bring more to the process than simply being a point of quality control. How do we set national cataloging standards that can be embedded within the technology so that the practice of cataloging can respond to the more nuanced needs of discovery that we now require? How do we set standards that still respond to the individual interpretations of differing communities? And that is about access, it is about particular words, but it's also about how that community wants to speak about itself. How do we bring today's voices to the process without losing our link to the past? I would love to see an opportunity for today's generations to interact with and react to the content of their ancestors. And I think this is also a point that Peter Lucas made. For us to capture for future generations, so the moment of a mokopuna, of a grandchild, listening to the voices of her grandparents and then speaking to those voices. And then for the next generations, so the grandchild of that grandchild to be able to see the intergenerational exchange that's happening through the use of these records. So earlier this year, we released our new strategic plan, and we deeply embedded in our thinking for that new strategy was community collections and our interactions with community. It gives us a different framework to work within. For me, the critical aspect of this change is the need to ensure our principles and values are kept up front and embedded in any emerging technology and we adopt it into our archive, that we adopt into our archive. Putting to one side the attraction of new and shiny and exciting and really evaluating how the tools we use to support our fundamental commitment to our kaupapa, to our constitution. Again, just speaking to Te Heku Media, when we did the project with them, one of the things that we could really lean into was that the principles aligned so closely to ours, and we could have a high level of comfort that they understood the challenges. And I went back after Kia, posted about what NFSA was doing and the principles that they put in place and tested our work against what he was saying and really felt another level of comfort that we were heading in the right direction. I think I think I've covered all that. I think I've run out of time. So I'm going to skip quickly to the end, but I just did want to say really quickly that Te Heku Media is leading the way in terms of getting us also to think about data sovereignty, about retaining the mātauranga Māori in New Zealand and onshore, so our Māori knowledge keeping it on our shores. We don't seem to be able to keep our people on our shores. They're drifting to Australia very quickly, but we'll try and get them to come home by making something great at home that they can respond to and connect with. And finally, just wanted to say that we have built what we think is our high-level principles, and the ones that we would test against. And this is what they are. Obviously, we keep looking at this, and we look at this in terms of everything that comes through our door, and particularly thinking about our kaitiaki, thinking about our depositors and copyright holders. So our outcomes framework talks through our intent and aspirations and embeds our commitment to kaitiakitanga, to working with people, partnership, and this is also embedded in our strategic plan. Coming back to my vision for a dispersed collection and working with communities is a question of how we ensure communities are able to engage with us on this vision. How do we ensure they have the tools, infrastructure and funding to make this work? I don't have the answers yet. But that's what we're thinking about. And I think the answers are already within our heritage world. I think that they are institutions that are already working with communities like libraries, like archives, like our museums, and that there will be multiple ways to make this happen if we all work together. Ka mi'i rā kia koutou katoa. Tēnei te mi'i o tēnei uri no Taranaki maunga. Kia koutou katoa. And I just want to finish with one final piece. A friend of mine, a patriotic frang. He loves to play a patriotic frang. He used to really rave, a flag he used to wave, because he had some money in the bank. He traveled round the world and spent his coin, and landed back here in the tenderloin. Without a single due, a song I'll sing to you, the chorus that he wrote I know you'll join. Makes no difference if you're Yankee, English, Irish, Scots, or Dutch. If your bank check's there and it's on the square, you needn't care if you're here or there. When you're rich, you're the smoke. When you're broke, it's a joke. It's the man behind the door that gets the call. With a good supply of money, everything is milk and honey under any old flag at all. They never asked your name around the earth. Thank you all.