Thursday, August 19, 2010

Coal NZ

Coal NZ, the customised web search tool that brings rich, carboniferous content right to your PC!

Digital images so rich you can smell the peaty mine stench, feel the clammy, stale air hovering in the mine shaft, and taste the coal dust. Collier meets compiler, canary meets computer scientist: you'll no longer have to venture into the chimney of your grandparents' house to get that authentic 18th century atmosphere, but can instead experience it in the comfort of your LAN party den.

Experience this revolution on the sidebar!



It's fascinating how digital technology brings us closer to the sooty industries of history. The hi-tech, low impact information repositories of the future, are allowing us a vivid experience of the enormous industrial developments which are key to our history. The coal industry, with its fundamental role in many industrial processes, was a central driver behind economic progress in many countries for over 200 years. In New Zealand this played out in particularly spectacular contrast with the ungoverned natural environment.

This search tool uses the single keyword 'coal' to capture all coal-related images and videos from the digital heritage repositories aggregated by Digital NZ. These limits allow single search terms such as a place name to bring up visual resources which can be previewed immediately in the blog sidebar. It also is limited by date from 1830 to 1993, or broadly from the beginning of industrial coal exploitation in New Zealand to the major structural changes in the New Zealand coal industry. In practice these date limits will not significantly affect the search results, but as more material is aggregated by Digital NZ these will become increasingly useful.

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