The Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) of King’s College London, the Department of Information Studies and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities of University College London, are pleased to announce the launch of the online resource ‘TEI by Example‘. Featuring freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), these online tutorials provide examples for users of all levels. Examples are provided of different document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those involved in the marking up of texts.

TEI By Example is a project that has been undertaken by Melissa Terras from UCLDH/DIS, in collaboration with Edward Vanhoutte and Ron Van den Branden from CTB. Comments on the resource are very welcome.

A Brief introduction to one of the UCLDH projects

By Valerie Wallace

Transcribe Bentham is a unique project funded by the AHRC DEDEFI fund and hosted by the Bentham Project in collaboration with the new Centre for Digital Humanities. Its purpose is to engage the public in the transcription of manuscripts written by Jeremy Bentham, the great philosopher and reformer. There are 60,000 Bentham papers in UCL’s library, many of which are untranscribed and unstudied, but which are potentially of immense intellectual importance. The project is unique in that it is harnessing the power of crowd-sourcing – a relatively new phenomenon – to aid transcription; something which has never been attempted before. We are designing a new on-line transcription tool using mediawiki which will be made available for use by others at the conclusion of the project. Transcribe Bentham is also a public engagement initiative as its aim is to promote Bentham studies generally and to encourage school learners and enthusiasts to participate. It is a heritage learning exercise which engages the community in the preservation and documentation of the nation’s history. An online discussion forum will encourage  input and social interaction thus widening  participation in the field. The community will be actively involved in shaping the presentation of history as the transcriptions will eventually form the basis of new printed editions of Bentham’s works, as well as a fully searchable on-line database. The project will, moreover, raise awareness of UCL, with which Bentham is intimately attached.

For more information about Transcribe Bentham you can visit the Transcribe Bentham blog, Twitter and facebook page

A Brief introduction to one of the UCLDH projects

I’m the research assistant (Claire Ross) on project LinkSphere, which is a joint research project with the University of Reading , funded by the JISC Virtual Research Environment 3 programme. The project is aiming to develop a virtual research environment (VRE) which will allow cross-repository searching across various digital collections and archives including (just to name a few) the Silchester IADB, Film Collection, Film, Television and Theatre archive, the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology collections, The Museum of English Rural Life collections and the Cole Museum of Zoology collections) producing a useful user interface to various disparate digital collections. Within this project we are also integrating a social network for researchers within the University of Reading to enable collaboration and ensure that it is possible to work more closely together on cross-disciplinary projects.

Development of the VRE will be undertaken at the University of Reading, with user analysis and usability from us at UCL.

My role is to focus on the user centric design aspect of the project.  The UCL team are on board to ensure that the project is a fully user driven design process, and that all user requirements are met and fed directly into the development of the project.  User centric design explicitly and actively includes users in the development process form an early stage.  Focusing on user requirements will hopefully enable the LinkSphere project to become embedded and owned by the users, creating a comprehensive collaborative tool specifically designed to the requirements of the users.

User research is currently split into two themes:

• Research into the use of digital resources within institutional repositories with particular focus on usability and functionality
• Academic use of Web 2.0 applications and Social Networks, with particular focus on usability, requirements gathering and functionality.

We will post regular updates atbout the usability side of the LinkSphere project on this blog. Further information about the whole project can be found at:

http://www.linksphere.org/about

Happy World Book Day! How are you going to experience a book today?  Hardback, paperback, ebook? There are more and more options about what to read,  what environment to read in, and different ways of reading to choose from.  It begs the question what makes a book a book?

For hundreds of years, the printed book has provided people with education, information and entertainment, yet today the supremacy of Gutenberg’s technology seems under threat.   Does the rise of electronic publishing forecast the death of the book?

Has the book reached the end of its shelf life or is this merely a transitional phase during which books – like music and photography before them – become part of the digital age?

As part of the World Book Day celebrations UCL has produced a podcast about books in the digital age with Professor Henry Woudhuysen and Professor Iain Stevenson, you can find out more and listen here.

UCLDH is also very interested in the future of the book, and is working on the INKE project, researching to advance our understanding of how reading texts and using information is affected by digital delivery.

There is also going to be a lunchtime lecture on the 11^th March to discuss what the future of the book holds.   UCL lunchtime lectures are streamed so if you can’t attend the event you can always watch it here

Jeremy Bentham's body, preserved at UCL

UCL Laws, in conjunction with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Department of Information Studies, and UCL Library Services, are pleased to announce the launch of the Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative, which has secured £260,000 funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s highly competitive Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) scheme.

Since the 1950s, The Bentham Project has been working towards the production of a new scholarly edition of the works and correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the influential jurist, philosopher, and social scientist, whom A.J.P. Taylor described as `the most formidable reasoner who ever applied his gifts to the practical questions of administration and politics’. However, more than  60,000 pages of Jeremy Bentham’s writings, held in UCL Special Collections, have not yet been transcribed and made available to those interested in his work.

The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative is a highly innovative and novel attempt to aid in the transcription of Bentham’s work. A digitisation project will provide high quality scans of the papers, whilst an online transcription tool will be developed which will allow volunteers to contribute to the transcription effort: providing a “crowdsourcing” tool which will be used to manage contributions from the wider audience interested in Bentham’s work, including school students, and amateur historians.

The use of such a tool for the transcription of cultural and heritage material is novel, and UCL’s CIBER group will monitor the use of the online tool, providing an in-depth study of how such a crowdsourcing application was used during the year- long project.

Work on the project begins on March 1st 2010, and the project shall be shortly hiring for two research assistants.  The online tool will be launched mid-summer 2010, when you can contribute to transcribing the works of Jeremy Bentham yourself!