Although it does not name him specifically, CIS Prof. Dr. Roger Easton Jr. is a part of this project!
Click here to view original article on The New York Times online
Researchers have rescued a 19th-century field diary by the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone from literal obscurity, using 21st-century imaging and processing technology to make his writing legible after the ink had nearly vanished from the page.
DIARIST David Livingstone kept journals for himself and the public.
The resulting document, published for the first time, helps flesh out the life of Livingstone, who in his day in Britain was revered as an adventurer and antislavery activist but who has become more broadly, and shallowly, known as the object of Henry M. Stanley’s greeting: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
A main element of the diary is Livingstone’s description of an event he witnessed in July 1871 — a massacre of hundreds of Africans by Arab slave traders — that when reported later in Britain helped galvanize support to end the East African slave trade.
The diary “gives a much more complete, rounded picture of how Livingstone responded to this,” said Adrian S. Wisnicki, an assistant professor of British literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and director of the imaging project, which published the diary online last week.
Dr. Wisnicki helped uncover the diary in 2009 while working on a book about Victorian-era travel in Africa. The document was in archives at Livingstone’s birthplace in Blantyre, Scotland (now a museum), but it was in bits and pieces. “Eventually we had the whole diary,” he said, “but you couldn’t read it.”
By 1871 Livingstone, in ill health and struggling through difficult terrain, had been long delayed in his explorations. Isolated for months in a Congolese village on the Lualaba River as he tried in vain to buy a canoe to continue his search for the source of the Nile, he ran out of writing paper.
He did, however, have a single copy of an 1869 London newspaper, The Standard, and he turned it into two 32-page notebooks. He wrote the diary across the pages, perpendicular to the printed text, and when he ran out of ink he used a local dye made from berries.
Over 140 years, the writing largely faded. “You can’t see the ink” in most cases, Dr. Wisnicki said. “And even if it’s there, it’s totally obscured by the newspaper ink.”
To make the handwriting legible once more, the researchers used light-emitting diodes and a high-resolution digital camera — with about five times the pixel capacity of a typical point-and-shoot — to take multiple images of each page under light of a range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet through the visible spectrum to infrared. The huge image files — more than a trillion bytes of data in all — were processed and analyzed by computer.
The images “show you how the document responds in different wavelengths,” said Keith Knox, an imaging consultant who worked on the project. “The printed ink has a flat response across the spectrum. But the handwriting is disappearing as you go into the infrared.”
The different responses let researchers digitally suppress the print, leaving Livingstone’s writing visible.
“We really couldn’t have done this without the broader technology — the LEDs and the imaging chips,” said Michael B. Toth, program manager of the imaging project.
Livingstone never intended the diary to be published. As was common practice, he used it as notes when writing a more reader-friendly journal, which he finished in 1872 and which Stanley, who had been retained by a New York newspaper to find Livingstone, brought to Britain.
Livingstone died in 1873 in what is now Zambia, but the journal was used, again with modifications, in an 1874 book that cemented his reputation as a heroic explorer.
Dr. Wisnicki said that in the diary, Livingstone recorded events as they were happening. The account of the massacre “is very rough, very chaotic,” he said, adding:
“He doesn’t know what’s happening. He feels bewildered, vulnerable.”
At one point Livingstone writes that he suggested that he catch the people who started the massacre “and put their heads on poles.”
Livingstone is also worried about the behavior of some of his own attendants, liberated slaves who had caused him nothing but trouble after being sent to him by the British administrator in Zanzibar. “If they go anywhere I must go with them or murder is certain,” he wrote in the diary. But such concerns are softened in the 1872 version.
“When he writes in 1872, he’s looking back on it in a more relaxed way,” Dr. Wisnicki said. “What he doesn’t want is any kind of suggestion that improper behavior by his men or himself contributed to the violence.”
Tim Jeal, a biographer of Livingstone who was not involved in the project, said the publication of the diary “gives a fuller impression of the sheer horror that Livingstone was up against.”
Scholars had known that in the later rewriting, things that had been taken out were pretty bad, Mr. Jeal said. “But he was no saint already.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 8, 2011
An article on Tuesday about an imaging project that restored an 1871 diary by the explorer David Livingstone misstated the location of his death, two years after the diary was written. He died in what is now Zambia, not Tanzania.
Last Modified: 6:25pm 08 Nov 11
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