Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the digital library to find the unarticulated narratives of African women in the expeditions of David Livingstone. It will present alternate narratives of exploration through which we can restore these women and their role to the historical record.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the digital library to find the unarticulated narratives of African women in the expeditions of David Livingstone. This paper uses the digital library to look at the available manuscripts and documents as palimpsests, identifying how they erase or reassure each other in the stories they propose of events. By reading across multiple interpretations of an event and seeing them as variable renderings of a specific location it is possible to present alternate narratives of exploration through which we can restore these women and their role to the historical record.

While revisionist and postcolonial scholarship has engaged in a substantial reappraisal of the European explorer in Africa, it is the digital library, as a technology of recovery that is today extending and expediting the process. The digital library enables the user to explore information contained in explorers' original documents - written in situ, during their travels - often revealing complexities that are lost in the official expeditionary narratives that they published on their return. It is in reading these texts digitally, against the grain of the traditional archive, that it becomes possible to uncover the appropriation of local knowledge, the interactive processes of intellectual production, and other material-based contributions that are embedded in such male-authored accounts. This paper will reappraise the Anglocentric male focus of nineteenth-century exploration narratives, via the opportunities digital humanities tools provide, to provoke the identification of lost or muted voices in the historical data.