The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative

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The Bentham Papers deposited in UCL Library consist of 60,000 folios. This material has never been properly edited, most of it has never been published, and two-thirds of it remains un-transcribed. Much of its content is, therefore, unknown. The Bentham Project was established in 1959 in order to produce an authoritative edition of 'The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham', and has to date published twenty-six volumes of a projected sixty-eight. In 2006 the Project completed an on-line database catalogue of the Bentham Papers, consisting of up to sixteen fields of information for each of the folios, including headings, dates, pagination, and titles. The database is currently used as an editing tool by the Bentham Project, allowing it, for instance, to identify all the manuscripts relevant to a particular work in a moment, rather than after several weeks of manual searching.Part of the vision at the time of creating the database was to enhance it by linking it to transcripts and digital images of the manuscripts. The Bentham Project has transcribed around 20,000 folios, but 40,000 remain to be done. Transcription is the first and fundamental stage in the editing of Bentham's works. A pilot project has established that an interface can be created linking transcripts, digital images, and the database catalogue, and that the digital images are of such quality that they can used for the purposes of transcription. The object of the present project is to develop a web-site which will integrate these various elements in a coherent way, but which will also implement a 'crowd-sourcing' exercise, whereby members of the public will be invited to submit their own transcripts of previously unread manuscripts.The transcription project will have a limited duration of six months. We will provide around 12,500 images of Bentham's manuscripts, amounting to around 10,000 folios. Individuals will be able to download a transcription tool, take ownership for a limited duration of images of manuscripts, and enter the text into a transcription window. There will be a series of basic rules that they will be asked to follow. Transcripts will be submitted to the Bentham Project for moderating, and once approved, made available on-line. Transcribers will be awarded a merit mark for each successful submission, both as a virtual reward, and as a means of identifying the truly dedicated, who might then be involved in some more formal way with the resource. We will establish a users forum and a means of undertaking joint transcription, so that two or more people can co-operate in producing transcripts.The transcriptions will eventually be used by the professional researchers at the Bentham Project when preparing the material for the new critical edition. They will also form part of an 'ideas bank'. Bentham wrote on a wide variety of subjects. His ideas were of enormous historical importance, but are also of great contemporary relevance. The transcripts will be readily searchable, so that researchers, whether academics or members of the general public, who are interested in a particular subject, can discover what Bentham thought about that subject. The Bentham Project's existing transcripts, which are currently in a proprietary format, and the newly submitted transcripts, will be encoded according to the protocol of the Text Encoding Initiative, thus guaranteeing the sustainability and transferability of the resource.At the end of the project, a study will be produced, using both quantitative and qualitative data, on the way in which the database was used, and on the lessons to be drawn from it. A generic transcription tool will be made available for other humanities digital research projects to incorporate into their own web-sites.