Professor Recovers Journal Entries Reflecting the "Real" David Livingstone

In 2009, Dr. Adrian Wisnicki, an IUP assistant professor of English and co-director of IUP’s Center for Digital Humanities and Culture who specializes in British literature, found pages from Livingstone’s original diary and then worked with a team of experts and with the Library of Congress to make the entries – many written with makeshift ink and on old newspapers -- legible.

Wisnicki’s work, which presents Livingstone’s more immediate and uncensored perspective on events that he witnessed, is the subject of a Washington Post news feature, published Nov. 1.

The link to the story is:http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/dr-livingstones-diary-on-19th-century-africa-now-uncensored/2011/10/31/gIQAUsB2aM_story.html

The focus of the recovered journal entries is an 1871 attack by Arab traders on villagers in Nyangwe (now Congo). Journalist H.M. Stanley, who came to find Livingstone on behalf of the New York Herald newspaper, wrote several articles about the attack -- based on Livingstone’s original journal entries and verbal accounts -- which helped to halt the East African slave trade.

Wisnicki explains in the Washington Post article that Livingstone’s uncensored journal entries made at the time of the event contain much more detail and differ in perspective from “The Last Journals of David Livingstone.” In order to recover Livingstone’s writings, the technology team used a process of lights of different colors and computer processing to identify the lost text. The full diary text will be electronically hosted at the University of California at Los Angeles and is available at the UCLA Digital Library website, http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/1871diary/Wisnicki will continue to study the text.