Maori in Crete: The unexpected meeting of two cultures

It was May 1941 when the 28th Battalion of New Zealand Maori fighters arrived in Crete to fight alongside British and Greek forces against the Germans. Although the Maori presence in far-flung Crete lasted only a few weeks, the bond between the two cultures remains alive to this day and the shared memories have been transformed into shared sites of collective remembrance. The most important part of a story is how it is structured and tied into a single narrative. Regarding this specific story that took place on the island of Crete, its data is quite scattered and fragmented. Therefore, the aim of this research is to be able to collect the separate pieces of the story and to bring them out through an integrated narrative process. The digital archival material for this particular historical event is wide,it can be found in different sources and in different formats. In particular it was retrieved from the digital collections hosted at the Alexander Turnbull National Library, from the 28th Māori Battalion Association website, from the Victoria University of Wellington Library, from the Army History Directorate of Greece, the Directorate of the Hellenic Army General Staff and some records from the Bundesarchivs Digital Bildarchiv. The maps that are used come from the Hellenic Army General Staff and the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. The digital archival material used in order to synthesise the historical event consists of photographs, oral testimonies, audio-visual material, topographical and cartographic material. The use of a variety of archival sources and quality materials can help to recover the stories and daily experiences of these people. (Ulrich 1990; Cope 1998; Sparke 1998; Smith 2000). In order for all this diverse digital archival material to be synthesized and eventually form a digital narrative,the ArcGIS Pro software by ESRI, which is part of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), was used. The spatial processing of the historical information through the creation of points, their connection to the archival material, the georeferencing of the cartographic material and the creation of several time layers in a common space, gives a clearer understanding of the historical event of the Battle of Crete. At the same time, GIS offers a framework that can present historical information without having to be set in strict time frames. For this alone, they are ideal for representing abstract concepts such as collective memory. This is, after all, what the process of collective memory (commemoration) itself seeks to do, to "get away" and escape from the conventions of time.The storytelling stage of the narrative is implemented through ESRI's online geographic story development platform called Story Maps. The platform combines the ability to tell stories with the help of the cartographic background and the ability to tell mapped stories for analytical purposes (Caquard & Dimitrovas, 2017). The result of the above process is the creation of a rich and interactive digital narrative, whose narrators are the digital maps that comprise most of the digital archival material used that is open to be viewed in Story Maps (https://arcg.is/1mPWiG0).