Abstract
Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that provides a global audience with public access to the vast written and visual legacies of David Livingstone (1813–1873), the British Victorian explorer of Africa. The site’s manuscripts span Livingstone’s adult life, ranging from family correspondence written in the 1830s to the field diaries of the 1870s composed in the Congo Basin. Additional illustrations, photographs, and other materials encompass nearly two centuries of relevant historical and contemporary sources. Over the course of Livingstone Online’s fifteen-year development, the project has made significant contributions to scholarly conversations and public knowledge about British imperial history and African history, and has become a leader in the field in developing best practices for the digitization and digital publication of manuscript material and images from the ‘global south’. In February 2020 three members of the project team gathered online to discuss the site’s latest edition — Livingstone’s Missionary Travels Manuscript (1857) — and the wider development of Livingstone Online as a nineteenth-century digital humanities project over the last decade and a half. Adrian Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) is the director of Livingstone Online; Kate Simpson (University of Glasgow) is an Associate Project Scholar who has contributed to each of the site’s critical editions; and Justin Livingstone (Queen’s University Belfast) is the joint director (with Wisnicki) of Livingstone’s Missionary Travels Manuscript (1857).
Highlights
Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that provides a global audience with public access to the vast written and visual legacies of David Livingstone (1813–1873), the British Victorian explorer of Africa
By partnering with nearly fifty archival institutions to date, Livingstone Online is today the largest online repository related to any historical British traveller in Africa (Fig. 1)
This extensive digital museum and archive supports different forms of scholarship: by collating documents held in institutions across the globe, Livingstone Online provides a digital resource for work on the reconstruction of African history, the Victorian missionary movement, the development of tropical medicine, the ‘prelude’ to the Scramble for Africa, the practices of geographical exploration, the production of expeditionary records, and the construction of imperial knowledge
Summary
Justin: Shall we begin by talking a little about our backgrounds before our involvement in Livingstone Online and the digital humanities [DH]? Adrian, what were you working on before you began to direct Livingstone Online?. In that year, I read some thirty to forty works in the series Through this process, I discovered that was I interested in African literature, history, and colonialism, but that I wanted to extend my research in that direction. Kate: So given your background as a Victorianist and your developing interest in British exploration as well as African culture and history, what was it that led you into the digital humanities?. Adrian: By 2009 I had made it to chapter four of the book and was developing a detailed economic history of a small village in central Congo called Nyangwe This village and some of the events that happened there, as I would later argue, came to have a major influence on subsequent British representations of Africa as a whole.
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