Livingstone's Missionary Travels Manuscript dir. by Justin D. Livingstone and Adrian S. Wisnicki (review)

"A critical edition of Missionary Travels" by David Livingstone (1813–1873) "is long overdue", Justin D. Livingstone observes in his wonderful introduction to the latest addition to Livingstone Online. The fully digitized 1100-page manuscript of this key 1857 work by the British missionary and explorer, as well as a handful of critical essays and illuminating associated images and texts, mark this MLA Approved Edition of Missionary Travels as a major accomplishment in scholarly editing. With its wealth of clearly structured, never before digitally-accessible material, this is a most welcome addition to Victorian scholarship in general and a valuable resource for those interested in Livingstone and his travels. It is a thrill to scan Livingstone's handwriting and see such an influential work take shape before one's eyes.

The Livingstone's Missionary Travels Manuscript site allows users to trace the development of the popular bestseller as author and editors wrestle in the margins. The manuscript is a rare artifact—a mix of original manuscript, dictation transcript, and editor's copy—and is not only fully transcribed but accompanied by high-resolution images, easily viewable online. The essays surrounding the manuscripts (especially the two-part "Composing & Publishing Missionary Travels") are a model for thorough and engaging scholarly writing. The sheer wealth of data and context, as well as the visual richness of its presentation, transcend what would have been possible with even an oversized print edition.

Co-directed by Livingstone (Queen's University Belfast) and Adrian S. Wisnicki (University of Nebraska–Lincoln or UNL), this edition—like Livingstone Online overall—follows best practices modeled by other TEI-based humanities projects associated with UNL and its Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In offering a side-by-side comparison of the two versions (manuscript and print) of Missionary Travels, for instance, a user can experience a canonical work in flux, similar to a recent variorum edition of Leaves of Grass published by the Whitman Archive, while the robust search-and-download framework (allowing batch downloads in various formats) echoes a project like The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online.

Unlike these other UNL-associated projects, however, the target audience for this edition of Missionary Travels appears to be almost exclusively a scholarly one. Annotation throughout the primary documents is sparse, with little direct explanation for historical terms and figures. A separate "Glossary of Key Terms in the Missionary Travels Manuscript" is available but no digital infrastructure connects it to the rest of the edition in a meaningful way. The almost complete absence of hyperlinking is counter-intuitive to users not schooled in the structural inflexibility that still marks scholarly digital editing. This edition feels, at times, all too static for a digital project and uninviting to a general user without much prior knowledge of Livingstone and his time. Its all-too-close adherence to a print paradigm is holding Livingstone Online back. This online Missionary Travels emphasizes flipping, where linking would be appropriate. There were also at least four different hands involved in the creation of the 1857 manuscript, but the interface does not allow users to effectively filter for these (though the excellent encoding would allow for it).

Missionary Travels presents its texts as monolithic, stable blocks to be read from top to bottom and not as a complex web of information. Following, for instance, a passage from manuscript to print in the comparison viewer necessitates manually locating it in each—the relationship of these two texts is one of static entities existing independently on a digital desk. The final, print version of Missionary Travels is also only available in the comparison viewer, disincentivizing lengthy perusal of what the manuscripts would become.

A reader interested in a specific term and its usage will also face needless hurdles: the search function disallows verbatim search (even when indicated using quotation marks) and always returns stemmed results (so that [End...