Hui-a-tau 2010

The Executive is planning to hold the 2010 Hui-a-tau in Wellington from Thursday 2 September 2010 - Sunday 5 September 2010.

Further details will be updated on the website as this becomes available.

Posted: Wednesday 11 November 2009


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Research Request

Tena koe,

My name is Dulce Piacentini. I'm a research assistant for the Legal Maori Project, at Victoria University, in Wellington.  This is a 3 year project funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology which will release a dictionary of legal terms in Maori that will be completed by the end of 2011.

We are now gathering texts for an important stage of the project; the Legal Maori Corpus.  This stage involves the compilation of a specialised corpus of legal Maori texts in digital form.  The principled compilation of this corpus will enable the collation of archival and contemporary legal Maori.  While we have already gathered more than 14000 pages of texts, we want to be absolutely sure that our corpus is truly representative of how the Maori language has been used to discuss, debate and critique Western legal concepts.  We consider a Legal Maori text that can be included in our corpus to be:

- a text in printed Maori;

- a text printed between the years of 1830-2009.

- any text produced within a "legal context": notices; press-releases; policy documents; speeches in House; Maori community generated language directed primarily to the Crown and also the wider community about legal matters (e.g. petitions); statutory language (bills and Acts); Maori language versions of deeds or Maori agreements; court and tribunal documents, regulations and forms; quasi legal language (documents from Maori organisations that use quasi-legal discourse).

We are particularly interested in texts that date from 1900 on.   We would appreciate it if any help can be provided to me or one of our other research assistants who will call in the next weeks.  If you have access to any documentation that you think would fit our criteria for inclusion in the corpus we would be grateful if you could relay this information to our research assistant when she calls.  If you have any specialist staff that deal specifically with Maori source material, we would also appreciate it if this request can be passed on to such staff. 

Nga mihi,

Dulce Piacentini
Research Assistant - Legal Maori Project
Victoria University of Wellington
E-mail: dulce.dequeirozpiacentini@vuw.ac.nz
Phone: 021 1643176 / 04 463 6319