Shining Lights: Magic Lanterns and the Missionary Movement, 1839—1868

A Note on Historic Names

In this dissertation, I emulate the transcription practices of Livingstone Online by including both the historic spelling of non-European names and their current forms. This technique is based on the regularization practices adopted by Livingstone Online, particularly in the critical editions of Livingstone's 1870 Field Diary[1] and Livingstone’s Manuscripts in South Africa, 1843—1872.[2] Both of these have received the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions’ seal of approval, and the project as a whole has been praised for the digital strategies that foreground Livingstone’s African context.[3] To represent historic and modernized spellings, Livingstone Online uses a series of XML tags to encapsulate both names. These editorial interventions are displayed as a dotted red line that appears under the transcription of the original word or phrase. After clicking on the word, a box of text appears on mouseover with information about the nature of the editorial intervention, including modern spellings of a place or person mentioned in Livingstone’s writings.[4]

I have adapted this strategy for HTML by bracketing names with a “span” tag and adding a title attribute.[5] This means that when the user hovers over a historic spelling, they will see a pop-up with the modern spelling, and vice versa. To represent the original content of nineteenth-century material, I have transcribed the name as it appears in the document and added the more modern spelling as a tooltip. In my analysis of this content, I adopt the opposite strategy; readers will see autonymns first. This enables me to avoid simply remediating nineteenth-century perspectives. Privelding spellings more faithful to the language spoken by non-European communities ultimately foregrounds the local contexts of nineteenth-century lantern shows.

Hover over Mzilikazi’s name to see how Livingstone spelled it.
[1] Livingstone's 1871 Field Diary, Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, dirs, Livingstone Online, Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, dirs, University of Maryland Libraries, 2017. The project’s glossary of people, communities, places, and features is of particular interest.
[2] Livingstone’s Manuscripts in South Africa, Jared McDonald and Adrian S. Wisnicki, dirs, Livingstone Online, Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, dirs, University of Maryland Libraries, 2018.
[3] The project was among those selected by the NEH for a digital exhibition celebrating its 50th anniversary. The NEH described the collection as follows: “Each of these stories is about a grant that changed the landscape of the humanities, and collectively, these grants represent the best of the work the NEH has funded over the last 50 years.” More recently, Roopika Rism has praised Livingstone Online as “a critical example of how to negotiate colonialist politics” through digital approaches to the material archive. See New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, Northwestern University Press, 2019, p. 19.
[4] For a description of these practices and samples of code, see “Livingstone Online TEI P5 Encoding Guidelines,” by James Cummings with Adrian S. Wisnicki, Heather F. Ball, and Justin D. Livingstone.
[5] An example: <span class="alt" title="Constantinople">Istanbul</span>

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