Welcome to Transcribe Bentham!

By uczwlse, on 6 December 2017

Jeremy Bentham

‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work‘, wrote the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in 1793.

In this spirit, we cordially welcome you to Transcribe Bentham, a double award-winning collaborative initiative which is crowdsourcing the transcription of Bentham’s previously unpublished manuscripts.

Anyone can start transcribing at our Transcription Desk. Your transcripts will contribute to the production of Bentham’s Collected Works and preserve Bentham’s writings into the future.

Find out more about Transcribe Bentham in the sidebar menu on the left, or scroll down to read the latest news from the Transcribe Bentham blog.

The ‘Bentham Bot’, and statistics update (October 2023)

By Chris Riley, on 24 October 2023

Transcribe Bentham users may have noticed recently that we now have use of an amazing new tool to help us process the vast amounts of transcripts you submit to us for checking—introducing the ‘Bentham Bot’ .

The ‘Bentham Bot’ has been developed by Dr Tom Couch, UCL Advanced Research Computing, for the mass detection of TEI encoding errors and for marking transcripts with no errors at all as completed.

The Bentham Bot allows us to detect incomplete tags and issues with TEI and to view all of these separately, before determining what’s wrong, making necessary amendments, and saving them alongside those that are submitted without coding issues. And we are delighted to see that, out of the extremely large backlog of completed transcripts, only a very small proportion were shown to have any issues, which is testament to your skills as transcribers and coders. During the Bentham Bot’s first run, 5,838 transcripts had no errors whatsoever, while only 329 contained incomplete tags or other coding issues!

This, of course, changes a few things. As already mentioned, the backlog has been reduced substantially, from ~6,000 transcripts at its peak, to 329 on Friday evening, or 361 at present!

This also means the Benthamometer has had a huge boost, with 39,525 transcripts now complete! That is 83.59% of all material currently on the Transcription Desk, which is incredible, so we are looking into uploading more boxes of the Bentham Papers.

Lastly, this change means that we will check transcripts word-for-word for accuracy at a slightly later stage, rather than checking them closely before marking them as completed on the Transcription Desk. Our hope is that this will speed up the overall process and ensure that the backlog of transcripts does not accumulate to previous levels.

Thank you immensely to Tom for developing the Bentham Bot and to our volunteers, whose contributions to the project continually exceed our expectations.

If you have any questions or queries about the above, or about Transcribe Bentham in general, please contact c.riley@ucl.ac.uk or p.lythe@ucl.ac.uk.

Current Transcription Desk downtime

By Chris Riley, on 1 September 2023

We are extremely sorry to report that the Transcription Desk is currently experiencing a very prolonged period of downtime.

The service went down on Monday morning at around 11 am BST, and normal functionality is yet to be restored.

UCL’s Research Computing team are looking into the issue and have rebooted the server on which Transcribe Bentham is hosted, but an effective fix has still yet to be found.

We are hoping to get everything back up and running as soon as possible, though we do not as yet know when things will be back to normal.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused

Transcription Update – June 2023

By Chris Riley, on 5 June 2023

Welcome everyone to the latest statistics update for June 2023.

Here are the full statistics for the initiative (as of 5 June).

30,540 manuscript pages have now been transcribed. A further 1,345 manuscripts are currently in progress, and 7,514 have been submitted for review.

Visit the Benthamometer for more information on how much has been transcribed from each box of Bentham’s papers.

Transcription Update – March 2023

By Chris Riley, on 3 March 2023

Welcome everyone to the latest statistics update for March 2023.

Here are the full statistics for the initiative (as of 3 March).

30,540 manuscript pages have now been transcribed. A further 1,297 manuscripts are currently in progress, and 7,225 have been submitted for review.

Visit the Benthamometer for more information on how much has been transcribed from each box of Bentham’s papers.

Transcription Update – July–August 2022

By Chris Riley, on 11 August 2022

Welcome everyone to the latest statistics update for July–August 2022.

Here are the full statistics for the initiative (as of 11 August). 30,119 manuscript pages have now been transcribed. A further 1,174 manuscripts are currently in progress, and 5,449 are waiting for review.

Visit the Benthamometer for more information on how much has been transcribed from each box of Bentham’s papers.