Wai-te-Ata Press and the Colenso Project
William Colenso - printer of some of the most significant documents in New Zealand history, missionary, explorer, botanist, politician, bilingual polymath... Controversial, opinionated, insightful and passionate, he had a keen appreciation of what it was to be an inhabitant of New Zealand in its earliest incarnation as a world of both Maori and Pakeha.
The aim of The Colenso Project is to ignite public and academic interest in Colenso's words – published, unpublished, private letters, journals; both in Māori and English - by sharing them with the world in digital form. We are building a hub for all things Colenso: a place to find and read original documents, explore transcriptions, and experiment with new research and interpretation methods.
Digital analysis will open new insights into the Victorian Republic of Letters - the nineteenth-century international community of information exchange and knowledge production facilitated by communication technologies and practices in the age of industry.
The story so far
The project is a collaboration between The Colenso Society, Victoria University of Wellington and MTG Hawke’s Bay.
Here we showcase some of Victoria University's contributions:
Find out more
The Colenso Project at MTG Hawke's Bay
The newsletters of the Colenso Society
Other inspiring projects
Stanford University’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project
The Darwin Correspondence Project
Mitch Fraas' work on the Indian Republic of Letters
Mapping the Lakes at Lancaster University
William Colenso - printer of some of the most significant documents in New Zealand history, missionary, explorer, botanist, politician, bilingual polymath... Controversial, opinionated, insightful and passionate, he had a keen appreciation of what it was to be an inhabitant of New Zealand in its earliest incarnation as a world of both Maori and Pakeha.
The aim of The Colenso Project is to ignite public and academic interest in Colenso's words – published, unpublished, private letters, journals; both in Māori and English - by sharing them with the world in digital form. We are building a hub for all things Colenso: a place to find and read original documents, explore transcriptions, and experiment with new research and interpretation methods.
Digital analysis will open new insights into the Victorian Republic of Letters - the nineteenth-century international community of information exchange and knowledge production facilitated by communication technologies and practices in the age of industry.
The story so far
The project is a collaboration between The Colenso Society, Victoria University of Wellington and MTG Hawke’s Bay.
Here we showcase some of Victoria University's contributions:
- Creating an interdisciplinary, international research hub.
- Building digital humanities research and teaching capacity among postgraduate students and researchers.
- Facilitating collaborations between computational science experts, historians, linguists, and more.
- Bringing together scattered resources for the first time for research, teaching and general interest.
- Developing innovative new digital tools and methodologies for biographical research.
- Using new digital humanities approaches and advanced computational science tools to identify and analyse Colenso's local and international intellectual, scientific, linguistic, religious, and political networks using his extensive published writings and voluminous letter correspondence. Text mining, social network analysis, topic modeling, and geospatial visualisation offer new insights into Colenso's multi-faceted identity as well as his pivotal role in a global system of information exchange and knowledge production.
- Contributing to a revisionist understanding of New Zealand’s place in the Victorian world and the world’s place in Victorian New Zealand.
Find out more
The Colenso Project at MTG Hawke's Bay
The newsletters of the Colenso Society
Other inspiring projects
Stanford University’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project
The Darwin Correspondence Project
Mitch Fraas' work on the Indian Republic of Letters
Mapping the Lakes at Lancaster University