UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (11)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Liz Kivi standing outside the UC QuakeBox at the Canterbury A&P Show.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (9)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Liz Kivi, Geoff Clements and Derek Bent setting up the television outside the UC QuakeBox container at the Canterbury A&P Show. The television played videos of previous stories recorded in the UC QuakeBox.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (17)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Chelsea Smith standing outside the UC QuakeBox container in the car park of Westfield Riccarton.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (13)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Geoff Clements and Sally Roome outside the UC QuakeBox at the Canterbury A&P Show.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (10)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Liv Kivi sitting outside the UC QuakeBox container at the Canterbury A&P Show.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (15)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Chelsea Smith standing outside the UC QuakeBox container in the car park of Westfield Riccarton.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (16)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Chelsea Smith standing outside the UC QuakeBox container in the car park of Westfield Riccarton.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (12)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Liv Kivi and Geoff Clements in the UC QuakeBox container at the Canterbury A&P Show.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (14)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Derek Bent, Troy Gillan and Lucy-Jane Walsh outside the UC QuakeBox at the Canterbury A&P Show.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (1)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Liv Kivi sitting outside the UC QuakeBox container in New Brighton. The container was parked south of the New Brighton Library.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (6)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Liv Kivi recording a story inside the UC QuakeBox container in Brooklands. The container was parked in the car park of the Brooklands Community Centre on Anfield Street.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (7)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A sign on a lamppost in Brooklands, reading, "The government is stealing our land".

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (4)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

The Brooklands Community Hall with the UC QuakeBox parked in the car park. A sign with the opening time has been placed on the other side of the road.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (5)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Liz Kivi stting beside the UC QuakeBox container in Brooklands. The container was parked in the car park of the Brooklands Community Centre on Anfield Street.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (3)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Derek Bent and Geoff Clements standing outside the UC QuakeBox container in Brooklands. The container was parked in the car park of the Brooklands Community Centre on Anfield Street.

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (8)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A sign in a shop on the corner of Anfield Street and Lower Styx Road in Brooklands. The sign reads, "Save Brooklands. We want to stay!".

UC QuakeBox photograph by Sally Roome (2)

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Derek Bent and Geoff Clements standing outside the UC QuakeBox container in Brooklands. The container was parked in the car park of the Brooklands Community Centre on Anfield Street.

The UC QuakeBox Project: Creation of a community-focused research archive

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.