Digital Humanities in Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary

In Liu’s “What it Means to be a Digital Humanists” he states that digital humanities often affiliates its self with older materials such as the remediation of older media such as books and libraries. After analyzing Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary, there would be no other way to decode the diary if it was not for the digital humanities. To decode the diary, the team used spectral imaging technology and digital publishing to make the series available and readable to others. Before this, the diary had been unreadable and unavailable to anyone who wished to view it.

Part of the Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary

Part of the Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary

The scholars who worked on this project used digital humanities methods when decoding and making the text legible rather than just traditional text based research. If they were to use traditional text based research they would have been more likely researching the project such as what the diary is about and information on who wrote it. They would have not been interpreting the illegible script that was already in the diary. The text-based research will provide the reader with more information about the diary itself that will be useful now that the diary is in legible script and available to everyone. After the research team used digital humanities in interpreting the text they then used digital publishing to publish the diary online.

Digital publishing makes it easier for the people who wish to see and read the diary to find and access it. The use of digital humanities comes in handy for many reasons, not only can digital humanities help in decoding illegible script, digital humanities can also help in preserving a piece of information such as it did with the diary. When the researcher team was given the diary to interpert , the diary was very fragile and could have fallen apart at any moment. The team had to pay special attention to and take special care in how they handled the pages when trying to interpret them. This is another aspect where digital humanities came in handy where traditional text based research would not have helped.