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Archive for October, 2013

Progress update, 28 September to 4 October 2013

By Kris Grint, on 4 October 2013

Welcome to the progress update for 28 September to 4 October 2013. After a brief interruption to our duties last week, the Transcribe Bentham editorial team is now fully back up to speed. Our transcribers, meanwhile, continue to show no signs of slowing down! Since our last full update at the end of September, a mammoth 27,876 words have been transcribed from Bentham’s manuscripts, along with an additional 9,027 words of TEI XML.

6,277 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially transcribed, which is an increase of 72 on last week’s total (and is up a total of 87 from the week before). Of these transcripts, 5,986 (95%) have been approved after checking by TB staff, up 90 from two weeks ago. We are very confident that next week will see our 6,000th transcript completed and locked. Considering TB only hit the 5,000 completed transcripts target at the start of April 2013, this is remarkable progress. Long may it continue!

The more detailed state of progress is as follows:

The papers relating to Panopticon in Box 122 remained the most popular box this week, with our volunteer transcriber Ohsoldgirl adding 58 new transcripts to this collection alone. One of the most interesting discoveries from Box 122 was Jeremy’s acknowledgement of his younger brother, Sir Samuel Bentham, as the originator of the architectural concept behind the Panopticon. In manuscript JB/121/527/002, part of the1813 compensation claim against the British government for the failure of Panopticon, Jeremy pays homage to the ‘ingenuity displayed by my brother’.

Students returned to the UCL campus this week, and everyone at the Bentham Project is looking forward to welcoming those taking our LLM module ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarian Tradition‘. Whilst extra credit for this course is not available for any work done on Transcribe Bentham, surely there’s no better way to get to know someone’s ideas by studying their handwriting?!

Our sincere thanks to everyone who has been so generous with their time, effort and patience over the past two weeks. Your contributions to Transcribe Bentham are greatly appreciated by us all.