Welcome along to the progress update for the period 11 to 17 January 2014, during which time further steady progress has been made by Transcribe Bentham volunteers. 9,859 words were transcribed this week, along with a further 3,603 words of TEI XML.
6,789 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 29 on last week’s total. Of these transcripts, 6,492 (95%) are complete and have been locked after being checked by TB staff; this is also up 29 on this time last week.
The more detailed state of progress is as follows:
Elsewhere, readers might be interested in the Bentham Project’s latest publication, the Memorandoms of convict James Martin, the manuscript for which is part of Box 169 of UCL’s Bentham Papers. The Memorandoms is the only first-hand account of perhaps the most famous escape of transported convicts from Australia: on the evening of 28 March 1791, Martin, in company with eight other prisoners (including William and Mary Bryant, and their two children), stole the governor of New South Wales’s six-oared cutter. In it, they navigated the eastern and northern coasts of Australia, encountered several Aboriginal peoples, and were fortunate to survive several ferocious storms. After a journey of just over two months, they reached Kupang, West Timor, where they successfully (for a while) passed themselves off as survivors of a shipwreck. This journey of over 5,000 miles in an open boat was an astonishing feat of seamanship and endurance.
This is the first time such a detailed, annotated edition of the Memorandoms has been published, and it has never been so widely available. The document, along with an introduction by Dr Tim Causer of the Bentham Project, is now freely available to read online, or can be downloaded as a PDF. We hope you find it of some interest.
Thank you, as always, to everyone who has contributed their time to Transcribe Bentham during the last week. It remains greatly appreciated by us all.