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Images, UC QuakeStudies

A photograph of a Christchurch City Council red sticker. The sticker was used by the Civil Defence after the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes to indicate that a building had been inspected and that serious structural damage had been found. The sticker states that there should be no entry to the building. It also states that 'entry may result in death or injury'.

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A photograph of paper hearts pegged on the cordon fence around the Chinese Methodist Church on Papanui Road. Quotes on the hearts read, "'Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.' Psalm 23", "'We can do no great things; only small things with great love.' Mother Teresa, and, "'Peace begins with a smile,' Mother Teresa". In the background, the earthquake damage to the Christchurch Chinese Methodist Church can be seen. The wall of the gable has crumbled, the bricks spilling onto the grass below.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

The University of Canterbury is known internationally for the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) corpus (see Gordon et al 2004). ONZE is a large collection of recordings from people born between 1851 and 1984, and it has been widely utilised for linguistic and sociolinguistic research on New Zealand English. The ONZE data is varied. The recordings from the Mobile Unit (MU) are interviews and were collected by members of the NZ Broadcasting service shortly after the Second World War, with the aim of recording stories from New Zealanders outside the main city centres. These were supplemented by interview recordings carried out mainly in the 1990s and now contained in the Intermediate Archive (IA). The final ONZE collection, the Canterbury Corpus, is a set of interviews and word-list recordings carried out by students at the University of Canterbury. Across the ONZE corpora, there are different interviewers, different interview styles and a myriad of different topics discussed. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus – the QuakeBox – where these contexts are much more consistent and comparable across speakers. The QuakeBox is a corpus which consists largely of audio and video recordings of monologues about the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes. As such, it represents Canterbury speakers’ very recent ‘danger of death’ experiences (see Labov 2013). In this paper, we outline the creation and structure of the corpus, including the practical issues involved in storing the data and gaining speakers’ informed consent for their audio and video data to be included.