User:AWisnicki
From Open Annotation Collaboration
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Adrian S. Wisnicki
Honorary Research Fellow
Birkbeck College, University of London
Heather Ball
Instructor
ASA Institute of Business & Computer Technology
Use Case: The Nyangwe diary of David Livingstone: restoring the text
Overview
Our research project (June 2010-Dec. 2011) will create a critically edited and annotated digital edition and spectral image archive of the Nyangwe Field Diary (1871) of David Livingstone, the celebrated Victorian doctor, missionary, and explorer of Africa. Livingstone wrote the 160-page diary, a key document for the study of British imperial literature and history, when stranded in Central Africa. As he ran out of clean writing paper, then ink, he improvised by writing crosswise over the printed pages of a series of books and newspapers and ultimately resorted to making his own ink from the seeds of a local plant. These expedients have not stood the test of time. Today Livingstone’s diary, which is held partly by the National Library of Scotland and partly by David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre, Scotland, is in a fragile state: its pages, which were also subject to adverse environmental circumstances, are crumbling, and large portions of Livingstone’s handwritten text have become illegible due fading, blotting, water damage, and other problems.
Our project, which draws on an international scholar-scientist-institution collaboration, will use on spectral imaging technology to restore the full text of Livingstone's diary and digital publication to make our results freely accessible to scholars and the public-at-large. Spectral imaging, previously applied in literary studies to recover erased writing in medieval parchment palimpsests (most notably, the celebrated Archimedes Palimpsest, see archimedespalimpsest.org), involves illuminating a text by successive wavelengths of light from the ultraviolet through the visible and near-infrared, capturing the images with a high-resolution digital camera, then processing the data to enhance select features of the text. Drawing on this technology, our work will set a new standard for the range of data that an electronic edition of a nineteenth-century manuscript can contain: XML-encoded transcriptions, critical apparatus, and bibliography as well as natural light images and spectral images processed to enhance text and topography. As a result, the project will enable remote scholarly study of both the discursive and material dimensions of the diary in a way never before possible. We also hope that the project will set the stage for a subsequent five-year program to publish all the extant field diaries from Livingstone’s final travels in Africa (1866-73), among the most complete sets of such diaries produced by any Victorian explorer of the African continent.
Value to the OAC Initiative
Our project could serve as a very instructive use case for the OAC initiative, especially as one of our goals is to make the project interoperable with other related projects. Our project is distinguished by the range of materials it includes and the annotations it requires, and poses unique challenges as to how these elements can be integrated into a linked electronic edition and spectral image archive.
Manuscript: Livingstone's original disbound diary consists of a series of heterogeneous manuscript pages drawn from such sources as the printed pages of an unidentified book of sermons, the front and back of a large map from the Royal Geographical Society, pages from issues of The Standard and Pall Mall Budget newspapers, reused envelopes, and other odd scraps of paper Livingstone had to hand. Our project also includes a selection of letters written during the same period and on the same sorts of materials. Each of these page types provides unique imaging, legibility, and conservation challenges, which our annotations will address through global and targeted annotations.
Images: Our project draws on the raw spectral images (totaling about one terabyte) captured during the spectral illumination and photography of Livingstone diary (summer 2010). For each page of the 160-page diary, our project will produce 12 to 16 registered "raw" spectral images, a range of standardized and processed spectral images focusing on enhancing both text and manuscript page topography, and natural light images.
Transcriptions: Our project will produce XML-encoded and spatially-tagged transcriptions of each page of Livingstone's diary and select letters. The XML transcriptions will be developed according to the TEI P4 "Tagging Guidelines" developed by Livingstone Online (http://www.livingstoneonline.ucl.ac.uk/technical/guide.html), but will also be updated to TEI P5 and further refined to reflect the interests of the scholars on the project (medical humanities; nineteenth-century western and tropical medicine; geography; African history; and Victorian imperial literature and history).
Interoperability: We also plan to develop RDF metadescriptors so that our project can be submitted to and be made interoperable with similar projects aggregated by NINES (www.nines.org/). In addition, XML transcription will be facilitated by the use of T-PEN, an innovative XML transcription tool (see http://digital-editor.blogspot.com/). T-PEN is being developed to be OAC compatible, so that users can export transcription and annotations in OAC format. The developers have selected this to ensure interoperability and the Livingstone project offers an excellent way to test and demonstrate that feature.
Textual Annotations: The critical electronic edition of the diary and letters will include a full critical apparatus. The apparatus will include rigorous annotations of Livingstone's text that reflect the expertise of the scholars on the project, as noted in the previous subsection. The annotations will reference both printed texts and external web resources and databases.
Image Annotations: In addition to the transcriptions, the critical edition will also include a range of secondary annotations of the raw spectral, processed spectral, and natural light images. These annotations will focus on the textual and material features of these pages, especially as revealed by the spectral imaging process.
Intertextual Annotations: By publishing Livingstone's diary alongside a selection of letters from the same period, the electronic edition will also facilitate, in effect, intertextual annotation: Livingstone's diary offers a textual and material commentary on his letters and vice-versa, a relationship that becomes particularly prominent and when the materials are studied and/or displayed side by side. Textual annotations will therefore have the potential to target more than one document.
Data Archive: Finally, the project will also produce a complete package of raw spectral images with documentation and full metadata that meets international library and archival standards (the data set will be based on the archive and metadata model used for the Archimedes Palimpsest).
