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Images, UC QuakeStudies

A photograph of women sewing felt badges outside the Christchurch City Library in Lyttelton. The felt hearts were a healing outlet during the Canterbury earthquakes. The goal was to create beauty in the midst of chaos, to keep people's hands busy and their minds off the terrifying reality of the earthquakes, as well as to give a gift of love to workers and businesses who helped improve life in Lyttelton.

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A photograph of women sewing felt badges outside the Christchurch City Library in Lyttelton. The felt hearts were a healing outlet during the Canterbury earthquakes. The goal was to create beauty in the midst of chaos, to keep people's hands busy and their minds off the terrifying reality of the earthquakes, as well as to give a gift of love to workers and businesses who helped improve life in Lyttelton.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

This report contributes to a collaborative project between the Marlborough District Council (MDC) and University of Canterbury (UC) which aims to help protect and promote the recovery of native dune systems on the Marlborough coast. It is centred around the mapping of dune vegetation and identification of dune protection zones for old-growth seed sources of the native sand-binders spinifex (Spinifex sericeus) and pīngao (Ficinia spiralis). Both are key habitat-formers associated with nationally threatened dune ecosystems, and pīngao is an important weaving resource and Ngāi Tahu taonga species. The primary goal is to protect existing seed sources that are vital for natural regeneration following major disturbances such as the earthquake event. Several additional protection zones are also identified for areas where new dunes are successfully regenerating, including areas being actively restored in the Beach Aid project that is assisting new native dunes to become established where there is available space.

Research papers, The University of Auckland Library

This thesis is a creative and critical exploration of how transmedia storytelling meshes with political documentary’s nature of representing social realities and goals to educate and promote social change. I explore this notion through Obrero (“worker”), my independently produced transmedia and transjournalistic documentary project that explores the conditions and context of the Filipino rebuild workers who migrated to Christchurch, New Zealand after the earthquake in 2011. While the project should appeal to New Zealanders, it is specifically targeted at an audience from the Philippines. Obrero began as a film festival documentary that co-exists with strategically refashioned Web 2.0 variants, a social network documentary and an interactive documentary (i-doc). Using data derived from the production and circulation of Obrero, I interrogate how the documentary’s variants engage with differing audiences and assess the extent to which this engagement might be effective. This thesis argues that contemporary documentary needs to re-negotiate established film aesthetics and practices to adapt in the current period of shifting technologies and fragmented audiences. Documentary’s migration to new media platforms also creates a demand for filmmakers to work with a transmedia state of mind—that is, the capacity to practise the old canons of documentary making while comfortably adjusting to new media production praxis, ethics, and aesthetics. Then Obrero itself, as the creative component of this thesis, becomes an instance of research through creative practice. It does so in two respects: adding new knowledge about the context, politics, and experiences of the Filipino workers in New Zealand; and offering up a broader model for documentary engagement, which I analyse for its efficacy in the digital age.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

Damage distribution maps from strong earthquakes and recorded data from field experiments have repeatedly shown that the ground surface topography and subsurface stratigraphy play a decisive role in shaping the ground motion characteristics at a site. Published theoretical studies qualitatively agree with observations from past seismic events and experiments; quantitatively, however, they systematically underestimate the absolute level of topographic amplification up to an order of magnitude or more in some cases. We have hypothesized in previous work that this discrepancy stems from idealizations of the geometry, material properties, and incident motion characteristics that most theoretical studies make. In this study, we perform numerical simulations of seismic wave propagation in heterogeneous media with arbitrary ground surface geometry, and compare results with high quality field recordings from a site with strong surface topography. Our goal is to explore whether high-fidelity simulations and realistic numerical models can – contrary to theoretical models – capture quantitatively the frequency and amplitude characteristics of topographic effects. For validation, we use field data from a linear array of nine portable seismometers that we deployed on Mount Pleasant and Heathcote Valley, Christchurch, New Zealand, and we compute empirical standard spectral ratios (SSR) and single-station horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratios (HVSR). The instruments recorded ambient vibrations and remote earthquakes for a period of two months (March-April 2017). We next perform two-dimensional wave propagation simulations using the explicit finite difference code FLAC. We construct our numerical model using a high-resolution (8m) Digital Elevation Map (DEM) available for the site, an estimated subsurface stratigraphy consistent with the geomorphology of the site, and soil properties estimated from in-situ and non-destructive tests. We subject the model to in-plane and out-of-plane incident motions that span a broadband frequency range (0.1-20Hz). Numerical and empirical spectral ratios from our blind prediction are found in very good quantitative agreement for stations on the slope of Mount Pleasant and on the surface of Heathcote Valley, across a wide range of frequencies that reveal the role of topography, soil amplification and basin edge focusing on the distribution of ground surface motion.