Exciting Digital News
Victorianists, I have news! Wonderful news, digital news! First, Middlemarch (1871), by George Eliot is now digitally available online. And here, go ahead...
This is obviously excellent. But we've had Middlemarch as a print novel with us for some time, so this "news" pales somewhat in comparison to the next bit of news about information we have not had at all about....
...the Scottish explorer, polyglot, and missionary, DAVID LIVINGSTON!
A new website has appeared amongst us: Livingston Online. This project aims to facilitate the study of David Livingstone's life, discoveries, mission, letters, etc. The project's leaders have provided the following details:
The first edition of the new version of Livingstone Online (University of Maryland Libraries, 2016) has now been published.Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that enables users to encounter the written and visual legacy of famous Victorian explorer David Livingstone (1813-1873).The site challenges reigning iconic representations of Livingstone by restoring one of the British Empire's most important figures to the many global contexts in which he worked, traveled, and is remembered.Highlights of the new site include:-- A dynamic, redesigned interface that combines images, critical essays, and extensive documentation to bring Livingstone's work to life for modern audiences and to take users far behind the scenes of our digital humanities research;-- Access, including download access, to over 7,500 manuscript and contextual images, 3000 metadata records, and 500 transcriptions. Our digital collection is one of the largest such collections on the internet dedicated to any historical British traveler to Africa;-- Multiple search and browse options for encountering our digital collection, including a fully redeveloped Browse by Digital Catalogue page, a new Browse by Timeline page, and our Browse by Addressee and Browse by Repository pages;-- Essays that for the first time set out the theory behind Livingstone Online, the principles by which we designed the site, and the guiding elements of our mission as a digital museum and library;-- And much more.
The new Livingstone Online is the most recent outcome of a 12+ year initiative that brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of specialists with forty contributing archives and repositories, including the National Library of Scotland, the David Livingstone Centre, the Royal Geographical Society, and SOAS, University of London. LEAP (the Livingstone Online Enrichment and Access Project), the most recent development phase, has been made possible thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
I've already been browsing around the website and my fingers are itching to explore more of this incredible work on a Victorian figure fascinating both to his own contemporaries and to future generations, whose legacy intersects with the history of Christian missions, colonial and post-colonial theory, imperialism, American imperialism, journalism, language studies, nationalism, you-name-it. Looking forward to the scholarship that will emerge from such a useful and timely resource!
UPDATE: Another new digital resource is newly available: The University of Kansas libraries have now digitized 300 individual letters and materials, much of it Rossetti family correspondence, along with 782 individual images, accessible for public browsing online.
