David Livingstone in the Digital Age: Livingstone Online and the Ontology of the Archive
Kate Simpson, Queen’s University Belfast
Explorer David Livingstone’s manuscripts show how scientific and political networks across the Victorian globe were set up and how the metropolitan ‘centre’ related to the imperial ‘periphery’. This globalism is mirrored in the multiple transnational collaborations currently in progress to create digital archives not only of Livingstone’s work, but many other nineteenth century primary sources. These transnationally created digital archives sit outwith nation boundaries, and draw together material from around the globe. Yet, although the archive can now be situated beyond country specific locations, is it still being shaped by the knowledge frameworks and authorities out of which its content came? Given that archives has gone global and digital it provokes a new set of questions, compelling scholars to both reflect critically on the construction of the archive and to engage with the ways in which it has been reconstituted as a result of globalised digital efforts.
It has been suggested that, in an era of cultural translation, transnationalism and contextual variances in post-colonial cultural responses to texts, it is the digitisation of our critical heritage which will allow widened access to archives and facilitate a diasporic reading of the nineteenth century. In light of this statement this paper argues that the archives we use should be interrogated for their omissions, and for not only the power structures inherent within them, but for the traces of previous historical power structures. As scholars of the nineteenth century, I argue, we should ask: what argument does the archive make? Who can access the archive? How does the archive present its material? What are the socio-political origins of the archive? In an age of proliferating electronic resources, moreover, how might the digital reorientate our conception of the archive and our ability to interrogate it? Examining David Livingstone, and the recent digitisation of his manuscripts, letters, diaries, journals and other artefacts by Livingstone Online, this paper discusses the ontology of the archive. It examines the often unquestioned constitution of the nineteenth century archive and evaluates the extent to which Livingstone Online has achieved its goal of creating a ‘critically-informed’ repository of one Victorian explorer’s complex manuscript legacy.
Kate Simpson k.simpson@qub.ac.uk
@kilmunbooks
Last updated: 30 January 2017
