Abstract
A technical report as part of the research project "Improvement of Accessibility and Searchability of Historic Map Images" by the School of Computing at the University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand in collaboration with Parininihi ki Waitotara, New Plymouth, Aotearoa, New Zealand.
The land wars of the 19th century, resulting in massive land confiscations by the British crown, form a particular dark chapter of Aotearoa’s history with far reaching consequences for Māori people to the present day and decades to come. From a cultural perspective the reconnection to the lost ancestral land is paramount to (1) grow and strengthen whānau (community) relationships. (2) tell the stories of the people long gone and (3) to look into the past to navigate the future - all three defining elements of Māori culture. From an economical point of view the search for missing land owners is an ongoing challenge which Māori incorporations face as dividends cannot paid out and decision making is compromised. Historical survey maps are important artefacts to trace ownership succession, name changes and the whereabouts of wahi tapu (culturally significant) sites. Although our collaborators at Parininihi ki Waitotara (PKW), a Māori operated business in New Plymouth, were gifted 686 digital images of high-resolution scans of over 300 historical maps of varying size, scale, coverage and level of detail, their usefulness was limited due to a lack of meaningful access. Together with PKW we developed a web interface to search and explore 80 georeferenced historic maps based on their location, contemporary land features such as rivers, roads and cultural sites, as well as map-specific metadata and annotations. In this technical report we present the results of a small-scale user study assessing aspects of the prototype's functionality and usability. We used a novel approach of a "guided heuristic evaluation" which does not require the involvement of usability experts. With this article we want to inform the reader about the preparation and conduction of the study. We report the actual results to show the nature of the data collected and hope to trigger the adaptation of our approach for other scenarios of usability testing where access to usability experts is challenging.