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ADRIAN WISNICKI: My name is Adrian Wisnicki, and I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. At Lincoln, I work in a number of different areas,

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including Victorian studies, post-colonial studies, African studies, and the digital humanities. I've been at the University of Nebraska Lincoln for about 10 years.

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And during that time, I've been involved in an area of literary studies called the digital humanities. And for those that aren't familiar with the digital humanities, it has

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to do with the application of computers and computing to the study of traditional humanities disciplines and, conversely, the application of humanities inquiry techniques towards computers, technology, and so on.

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At the University of Nebraska, I'm involved in a number of digital humanities projects that focus on the colonial era. These include one called Livingstone Online, which

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focuses on the manuscript legacy of explorer David Livingstone, another called One More Voice, which focuses on recovering racialized voices from imperial and colonial archives, and, finally, a third called On Disciplining

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the Victorian classroom, which centres on bringing questions related to race to the fore of classrooms that focus on the Victorian era. Colonial literature can be defined

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in various kinds of ways. But very generally speaking, colonial literature is a kind of literature that was produced during the British colonial era, which can be defined

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in various kinds of ways. In my particular case, I look at colonial literature from the Victorian era so from the late 19th to early 20th century.

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And this literature historically has been understood as being produced by British authors, travellers, administrators-- various people representing the British empire.

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But more recently, it's really being defined as literature produced by anyone within the British Empire, particularly people of colour, Indigenous people. And so my research really takes up

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that dimension thinking about the other people that were involved in producing and kind of documenting knowledge of various sorts during the Victorian colonial era. So when we look at the contemporary world,

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one question we might have, especially when we consider contemporary geopolitics, is how does the world come to be the way it is? A lot of the contemporary world, especially when

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we turn to locations like Africa, Asia, Australia, and so forth and so on, has been shaped by events in the past during the colonial era. And so studying colonial literature

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really gives us a kind of glimpse into the deeper historical roots of a lot of contemporary political situations that we see. So for example, people often wonder how African politics

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kind of came to develop-- contemporary African politics came to develop. And one way to answer that question is to look back into the 19th century

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and to think about how the advent of British imperialism, British colonialism on the African continent shaped the way that people in Africa relate to one another and relate to the larger world.

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Colonial literature, depending on who's practicing, interpreting it, or working with it, can really be defined in a lot of different kinds of ways. Coming from a literary perspective,

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one obvious way to think about colonial literature is to think about the fiction and poetry produced during the period of British imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century and going into the 20th century.

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In my particular case, however, I've been much more interested in nonfiction manuscripts and manuscripts produced in the context of particular British individuals

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interacting with people around the world and documenting those experiences. What I've found is that those kinds of non-fictional primary sources are often

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unique historical records that allow us to understand interactions, cultural situations, social situations in the 19th century in ways that we can't through other comparable documents.

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So in my particular case, I'm very interested in going back to what I call the "raw documents" of the field because those kinds of documents give us a much more unvarnished look at how colonial encounters

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in the 19th century occurred. When we talk about non-fictional sources, it can sound like a monolithic category. But, in fact, that category really

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contains a wide array of materials. So in my case, I've looked at materials as diverse as field diaries, so diaries produced while explorers were travelling and jotting down their quick notes;

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more developed journals that were created when individuals sat down with time at their hands, looked back on periods of recent activity, and documented those periods; sketches produced in the field,

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illustrations, maps, which often contain all kinds of material related to different data collected from different individuals that were local; and even something as simple as letters, which were written from the field back

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to individuals in Britain but that often contain information that's left out of other sources. My work with British colonial literature, in particular British colonial archival literature,

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goes back to the late 2000s. During that period, I was working on a critical monograph about the history of travel and exploration in 19th century Africa.

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And what I found is that, as I started to work with primary texts, working with texts that just existed in published form wasn't sufficient for the kind of questions

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and for the kind of research that I was doing. So I realised I really needed to work with primary sources that were held in archives. That led to me reaching out to various archives

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and starting to work with the archivists there to understand the kinds of materials that were held in those archives and understand how those materials could support the kind of research that I was doing.

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So in my particular case, I tend to focus on primary materials that are held at various archives. And the way I go about finding those materials depends on the combination of endeavours.

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So one, if I'm working on a particular topic, I try to figure out which archives might have materials that are most relevant to that topic. Once I've got a sense of which archives

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I should be working with, I start looking at the catalogues that those archives have already created. Unfortunately, catalogues of that sort often reflect particular perspectives,

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particular biases. And so a next step that I might take is to reach out to the archivists at a particular archive and start

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talking to them to get a better sense of the materials. They'll often have insights into the materials that aren't necessarily captured in the catalogue records. And then the next step might be for me to visit an archive

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and start looking at the materials there. And that, of course, can be a bit more of a time-intensive process because I have to sit down with a variety of materials.

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Not all of them will ultimately be relevant. But I've got to work my way through them to get a sense of the materials and to figure out what can and cannot be relevant to my research.

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So I, as a established professor at this point, have developed really good relationships with archivists at various institutions. One of the projects that I worked on, Livingstone Online,

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ultimately ended up collaborating with something like 50 different archives around the world. And so what that means is just, when I begin working on a particular question or research topic,

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I already have a pretty rich array of contexts on which to draw. And so that really facilitates my research. So, in some ways, my research process

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might look a bit different from the average scholar or individual just because of my digital humanities background and the fact that I have such extensive experience. So, in some cases, I might reach out to an archive

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or reach out to particular archivists and say, hey, do you have materials that fit this topic? In other cases I might do what any other researcher would do, which is start looking through online resources or other kinds

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of catalogues that document what types of materials are held. So for example, one really good resource in this regard is something called Copac, which is a general online catalogue which brings together descriptions

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of archival materials at various British archives. When a student decides to work on some aspect of colonial literature, the student has a variety of options available.

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So one is to kind of follow a traditional route that scholars have generally followed in working with archival materials, which is to search out particular archives that hold

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materials relevant to the student's research and then to begin working at those archives or with those archives to look at the relevant materials. Luckily, one thing that's been happening over the last 20,

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30 years, or so as the digital has become a larger and larger part of our lives is that a lot of scholars like me have become involved in different projects that

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focus on different aspects of British and other archives to digitise the relevant holdings, to publish them online, and make them available to a wide array of users.

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The same is true for commercial publishers like Adam Matthew Digital. So what that means is that, in addition to traditional routes, a student can also go online and start

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looking around and figuring out what's available online. So, for example, if they're working on a British Explorer like David Livingstone or anything that relates to David Livingstone's career,

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they could go to one of the projects I worked on called Livingstone Online, which has about 15,000 different items in the archive. If they're, on the other hand, interested in thinking about

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writers of colour, Indigenous writers from across the British empire, they could go to a different project I've worked on called One More Voice, which is slowly beginning to recover the materials that are relevant to that kind of endeavour--

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publish them, make them available, and make people aware of the existence of those materials in the first place. And this is just thinking about the work that one scholar has

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done when we think about the larger stage of different scholars working on these kinds of endeavours. Students have really a wide array of materials available to them online that they can easily

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access in a way that scholars in previous generations weren't able to do. In working with any kind of archival materials related to the British empire, I think

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that it's important to have a variety of strategies or approaches to these materials. So first of all, when you're working with specific materials, it's important to know the broader

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historical context. These days, for someone like me who officially works in literary studies, it's almost impossible to engage in literary studies without having a good sense

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of history as well. So any given literary critic who works on the British empire really also has to have one foot in the world

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of British imperial history. So on one hand, it's important to see the individual materials but see them within the broader context of the British empire. On the other hand, it's really important

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to look at the materials and really carefully think about what they say. So, for example, in my case, one way that I like to think of myself is the equivalent

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of something like a detective who lies down in the dirt and puts a microscope up to the ground to look at the ground. So when I look at materials, I look at them very carefully. I look at what's written on the page.

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But I also think about the material history of the particular manuscript. Are there features of the manuscript that can somehow illuminate the writing on the page?

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Are there features of the manuscript that help us understand the history of how that manuscript has been transported over time, how it's been preserved?

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And so through this combination of close textual analysis but close material analysis, individuals, and in particular students, can develop a really good understanding of a particular manuscript.

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And that, in turn, when it's added to their understanding of the historical period can really produce some interesting analysis, even for someone who's just an early career scholar as a student.

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One More Voice, broadly speaking, is a project that focuses on recovering the racialized voices that exist in 19th century British imperial and colonial archives.

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I launched One More Voice in about 2020. But I'd actually been thinking about questions related to the project all the way back into the late 2000s. And what ended up happening is, as I

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worked on the manuscripts of British explorers, I became aware of the fact that, although those manuscripts were ascribed to particular British individuals, when we look carefully at those manuscripts,

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we discover that there was actually a wide variety of voices that were embedded in those manuscripts. It might be that a British writer was actually

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writing the manuscripts. But that writer was actually documenting various kinds of conversation, various kinds of data that he or she had gathered from local informants.

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And so One More Voice really responds to that observation. Instead of focusing on authorship, which can really narrow the field as to what exists in these manuscripts, it focuses on the idea of contributions.

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It looks at manuscripts. And it thinks about the total process that went into creating those manuscripts, how different people were involved, and then considers

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how we might identify and think about those other people and their role in the production of knowledge. So, ultimately, it's able to argue for the fact

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that British colonial manuscripts, no matter how nominally authored by one person, are actually a documentary record that contains a wide array of voices and that those voices in turn

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are really important for us to consider on their own because they offer very different perspectives on British imperial and colonial history from those that we've traditionally been accustomed to.

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Working with sources that contain perspectives from other individuals from the British empire that aren't necessarily British, it's really important to be aware of the manuscript in front of one.

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And in particular, it's really important to be aware of the fact that the voices that one is accessing through the manuscript aren't necessarily pure, unfiltered voices.

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They're coming to us mediated through a different author. And so, when we're working with these voices, it's really important to be mindful of that, to be aware of the limitations of that,

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to be aware of the inherent biases of the author, and to bring in different kinds of interdisciplinary perspectives to understand those voices. So when we're thinking about the voice

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of one particular individual in a manuscript, we might try to learn about that individual's culture, see if learning about that individual's culture can help us illuminate some of the things that are being said,

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and also helps us understand a bit about how we might approach a particular source as being more or less trustworthy based on other information we're able to gain through a contextual means.

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One example of how one might work with complicated, historical sources that come to us in a mediated fashion is to think about David Livingstone and to think about some of the African individuals with whom he travelled.

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In Livingstone's case, we're very fortunate in that we have multiple perspectives on particular aspects of some of Livingstone's final journey. Livingstone travelled with African attendants, so he,

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as he travelled, documented his own experiences through his diaries and other materials. But there are several individuals travelling with him that also recorded their own experiences at different times,

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either contemporaneous to Livingstone or nearly contemporaneous to Livingstone or sometime after. These people include a variety of African attendants that Livingstone had travelling with him.

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And when we look at their accounts and compare them with Livingstone, we get different perspectives on particular events. Once we put those different perspectives together,

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we can kind of get a sense of the reliability of different perspectives. We can see how Livingstone is slanting things. We can see how the African individuals are presenting

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things from their perspective. And so looking at all those materials together, we can produce a much more comprehensive critical understanding of those particular materials than we

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could if we were only looking at the British perspective through Livingstone or even if we were only looking through the African perspective through the individuals that travelled with the Livingstone.

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Any of these source materials will exist in a variety of places. I've consulted some at the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum at the National Library of Scotland.

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There's one particular manuscript that's at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia. And so traditionally, these manuscripts would be a bit challenging to access

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because they're located in so many disparate places. But nowadays, they're all published through One More Voice. So if someone's interested in studying them,

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one can just go to One More Voice and look at the different perspectives which are all there. So the materials exist in different places.

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Some of them exist in archives. A few of them are actually in print in archival sources. Manuscript sources for them don't exist. Some exist in finished form.

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And some exist actually as just journal notes or diary entries, so are really unfiltered and give us particular very "raw" ways seeing how these individuals perceived history.

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It's been really exciting to work in the field of digital humanities over the last 10 or 15 years or so because I've really been able to watch the field develop

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in really exciting ways. When I first started working in the digital humanities in the late 2000s, there was a lot of emphasis on developing digital humanities projects that

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were archival in nature that comprehensively brought together materials around certain individuals or topics. But in the early 2010s, that interest started to evolve in really interesting ways.

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People started to ask questions about race, about gender, about infrastructure. And so people really started to look under the hood of digital humanities projects

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and think about the larger ideas that were driving those projects, the larger commercial relationships that were driving those projects, and really start to think about how projects could be

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built in more meaningful ways. The asking of those kinds of questions really led to a push to developing different kinds of digital humanities projects that were much more inclusive in their nature, that

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drew in particular communities that were affected by the projects, that gave those communities a voice and a stake in the projects, and, ultimately over time, have resulted in a shift in the field where there's much more

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of a focus on the community in which projects are resonating and involving that community so that the ultimate projects that come out are very resonant from a scholarly perspective but also from a local community perspective and so represent

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a kind of total endeavour that really works well in different kinds of audiences. When I work with students, I really like to make things very manageable for students.

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And so when students are working on any aspect of the British empire or British colonial literature, what I always encourage them to do is think about the smallest possible unit that

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has meaning within the larger project. So if they're interested in exploring a large topic related to the British empire, I'll often encourage them to think about a particular text that

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illustrates that topic and start there. Start looking at the text. Start thinking about the historical context of the text. Start thinking about different ways

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that the text might be illuminated by turning to the archive if possible. Start thinking about whether there are already existing online resources that relate to that text.

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And so once students have that kind of large endeavour shrunken down into a size that's much more manageable, they're also much more encouraged to go toward that topic, start thinking about it, start researching it.

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And they realise that, by working on that particular topic, they're starting to touch the bigger issues and themes that run through that topic.