The governor bought a sample, not the stock

Claim (verbatim)

When Governor George Grey wanted the Māori world on paper, he commissioned it: his collection — the GNZMMSS series in Auckland Libraries' Grey collection — runs to thousands of pages, and its largest single hand is Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke of Ngāti Rangiwewehi, who wrote him some 800 pages across about twenty-one manuscripts in roughly four years around 1850, the corpus Grey silently mined for his printed Polynesian Mythology (Jenifer Curnow's study in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, 1985, documents both the output and the mining). The economics of the transaction are the evidence: 800 pages is what one classically trained man produced when paper, time and payment were supplied. His training was not unique — it was the standard equipment of his standing — and mission-school literacy was a mass phenomenon by mid-century. What was scarce was only the patron. Commissioned collecting therefore skimmed a thin, patron-shaped sample off a broader uncommissioned production: the whakapapa books and lore notebooks whānau wrote for themselves and kept — exactly the class of manuscript that has surfaced in archives ever since with no collector at its origin. Patronage concentrates volume; literacy distributes authorship — two signatures a census can separate, and the second one measures the production the collectors never saw. Prediction: a census of nineteenth-century Māori-language manuscript books across Auckland Libraries (GNZMMSS), the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Hocken Collections will find distinct writers of non-commissioned books (no collector or patron at origin) outnumbering the writers represented in the commissioned collections by at least three to one, while the commissioned collections retain the majority of aggregate pages (primary clause: the three-to-one writer ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a writer-level census over the Auckland Libraries GNZMMSS finding aids, the Alexander Turnbull Library manuscript inventories and the Hocken Collections, with Curnow's Te Rangikāheke inventory (Journal of the Polynesian Society 94, 1985) as the anchor control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: a census of nineteenth-century Māori-language manuscript books across Auckland Libraries (GNZMMSS), the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Hocken Collections will find distinct writers of non-commissioned books (no collector or patron at origin) outnumbering the writers represented in the commissioned collections by at least three to one, while the commissioned collections retain the majority of aggregate pages (primary clause: the three-to-one writer ratio; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a writer-level census over the Auckland Libraries GNZMMSS finding aids, the Alexander Turnbull Library manuscript inventories and the Hocken Collections, with Curnow's Te Rangikāheke inventory (Journal of the Polynesian Society 94, 1985) as the anchor control.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Curnow's study of Te Rangikaheke (Journal of the Polynesian Society 94, 1985) documents both the roughly 800 commissioned pages and Grey's silent mining of them for Polynesian Mythology, and the existence of uncommissioned whakapapa and lore notebooks kept by whanau is standard in the manuscript-culture literature (McRae, Maori Oral Tradition, 2017). But the primary clause is a writer-level census across Auckland (GNZMMSS), the Turnbull and the Hocken yielding a ratio of at least three-to-one of non-commissioned to commissioned authors, and that census was not located as ever having been compiled; the kill is honestly flagged not-yet-built. Adjacent.

• Jenifer Curnow, 'Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke: His Life and Work', Journal of the Polynesian Society 94 (1985)
• Jane McRae, Maori Oral Tradition: He Korero no te Ao Tawhito (Auckland University Press, 2017)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.