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Digital edition Preservation Textual analysis

Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary

The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project

Link to project home page

About the Project
(excerpted from the project website)

The publication of Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral Critical Edition reveals for the first time the original record of a remarkable and traumatic period in the life of David Livingstone, the celebrated British abolitionist, missionary, and explorer of Africa. The date of publication coincides almost exactly with the date Livingstone completed this diary in Central Africa 140 years ago. The original, previously unpublished text of the diary has remained inaccessible until now, due to the fragility of the paper and the near-illegible script. The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project has restored the full text of the diary by using cutting-edge spectral imaging and processing technology, and now makes the diary available through this electronic edition.

The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project is a collaborative, international effort to use spectral imaging technology and digital publishing to make available a series of faded, illegible texts produced by the famous Victorian explorer when stranded without ink or writing paper in Central Africa.

Screenshot 2014-08-24 09.07.31“The publication of Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral Critical Edition reveals for the first time the original record of a remarkable and traumatic period in the life of David Livingstone, the celebrated British abolitionist, missionary, and explorer of Africa. The date of publication coincides almost exactly with the date Livingstone completed this diary in Central Africa 140 years ago. The original, previously unpublished text of the diary has remained inaccessible until now, due to the fragility of the paper and the near-illegible script. The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project has restored the full text of the diary by using cutting-edge spectral imaging and processing technology, and now makes the diary available through this electronic edition.”

Published by Livingstone Online and the UCLA Digital Library Program
http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/

By Katie Faull

Dr. Katherine Faull is Professor of German and Humanities at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA. Author and editor of six book-length publications, over 40 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, she was educated at King's College, London (BA Hons, German/Russian) and Princeton University (Germanic Languages and Literatures), and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. The recipient of three major grant awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has published extensively on questions of gender, race, and autobiography in the Moravian Church in North America in the colonial period. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Moravian History, the book series, Anabaptist and Pietist Studies with the Pennsylvania State University Press, and is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA. Her current international collaborative DH project, Moravian Lives, focuses on the digital exploration of Moravian memoirs (moravian.bucknell.edu) and brings together top international scholars in the field of Pietism with graduate and undergraduate students in the exploration of 18th-century life writing, gender, race, and the Moravian world. Katie has also published scholarly articles on digital pedagogy at a liberal arts institution, DH and religious history, and digital visualization in the humanities.
For more, go to http://www.katiefaull.com