Friday 1 June 2012

"Dr. Livingstone I Presume"'s field diary

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that a group of scholars and archivists have been working to make legible an 1871 field diary kept by Dr. David Livingstone in Africa. Apparently Dr. Livingstone ran out of writing equipment and wrote some of his diary on old newspaper sheets with ink he made from berries. It has taken more than two years but with fancy scanners they have succeeded in making 99 percent of the diary legible. The article includes before-and-after images of one of the pages, and has a link to the entire Livingstone Spectral Image Archive which includes TIFF images, XML transcriptions, and metadata for the diary.

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