The long-term goal of the Ātea Project is to help build prosperous, culturally thriving and technology-driven Māori economies for future generations. It also seeks to better connect Māori, iwi and communities—whose tribal members are increasingly globally dispersed—with their Mātauranga-ā-iwi, reo, tikanga, histories and knowledge. To achieve this a key element in the project is the development of a suite of digital tools centred around Māori identity that provide capabilities such as a speech-to-text recognition for Te Reo Māori and authentic cultural experiences through Virtual and Augmented Reality techniques.
Through the project we will also develop a digital repository in which to amass the data and cultural content that is necessary to reach these goals. It is this aspect that gives the project its name: ātea is described as space, a wide expanse, or something that is clear and free from obstruction. The digital repository is instrumental in helping drive and support the development of the digital tools: to develop speech-to-text for Te Reo, for instance, we need a substantial corpus of audio recordings of spoken Māori. However, the cultural nature of the content we plan to store means there are challenges over access to be faced that go beyond the normal remit of what is usually provided by digital repository software. It is this requirement of the work that has led us to work with a technique pioneered by the HathiTrust Research Center called Non-Consumptive Research, and to explore how it can be utilized to support the goals of the Ātea project.