LIVINGSTONE SPECTRAL IMAGING PROJECT In 2009, the United States National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Academy funded a project with the goal to decipher and make available to the public important letters and diaries belonging to famed doctor, missionary, and explorer, David Livingstone.
 
A letter from the personal collection of Peter and Nejma Beard, Letter from Bambare, written by David Livingstone in 1871 to his friend a later biographer, Horace Waller was the first document to be decoded in the project. Through innovative spectral data imaging, a previously indecipherable document is now legible and is a crucial insight into Livingstone's expedition.

The team led by Adrian Wisnicki plans to complete this project by November, 2011, in time for the 140th anniversary of the Livingstone-Stanley meeting, when Henry Morton Stanley, a New York newspaper reporter, famously proclaimed upon finding him by the shore of Lake Tanganyika, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Link to Livingstone Project website:

http://emelibrary.org/livingstoneletter/index.htm  

Links to press:

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2010-09/Livingstone.html  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tht9