Welcome along to the progress update for the period 25 to 31 July 2015, during which time further excellent progress has been made by Transcribe Bentham volunteers. As the project’s fifth birthday approaches in September, we are well on the way to having our 14,000th transcript worked on!

13,452 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 60 on last week’s total. Of these transcripts, 12,639 (94%) have now been checked and approved by TB staff. (We’ve been continuing to work through the body of partially-transcribed manuscripts, and others we may have missed in the past, which accounts for the increased approval rate).

The more detailed state of progress is as follows:

Eagle-eyed transcribers will have noticed that this week we uploaded a new batch of material to the Transcription Desk. You can now transcribe more manuscripts from the British Library’s Bentham Papers, namely Additional Manuscripts volume 33547. This material mainly contains Bentham’s thoughts on prize law, that is the mechanics of paying bounties to seamen for capturing foreign ships during times of war. Yet more material will be uploaded for transcription in the coming weeks – there’s certainly no shortage!

We are also delighted to say, that thanks to a UCL Grand Challenges Small Grant, a team led by DARE Collaborative, the UCL Institute for Education, DuckDuckZeus Games, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and the Bentham Project will be developing Panopticon Pandemonium, in which you will be able to try and run your own panopticon prison. Watch this space, as they say…

Thank you, as always, to everyone who has contributed to Transcribe Bentham during the last seven days. It remains as greatly appreciated as ever by all of us here at Bentham HQ.

Welcome to the progress update for the period 11 to 17 July 2015, during which time further excellent progress has been made by Transcribe Bentham volunteers.

13,392 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 41 on this time last week. Of these transcripts, 12,532 (93%) have been checked and approved by Transcribe Bentham staff. (This week, we had a look through the list of partially-transcribed manuscripts and were able to check and approve 174 of them. If you would like to work on a partially complete transcript, please do consult the big list).

The more detailed state of progress is as follows:

The big news this week is that the transcription of Box 150 is now complete! Since the turn of the year, volunteers have transcribed around 500 manuscripts from this box alone, assisting our colleague Dr Michael Quinn in producing the next volume of Bentham’s Collected Works, and making some terrific discoveries along the way. Expect a round-up update in due course from Dr Quinn about these manuscripts.

We hope, in the coming days, to add fresh material to the website for transcription, and will let you know once it’s up and running.

And finally, Bentham made an appearance on The Guardian website yesterday, in an article which asks “What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance?”

Thank you, as always, to everyone who has contributed to Transcribe Bentham during the last seven days. It remains as greatly appreciated as ever by us all.

Welcome to the progress update for the period 11 to 17 July 2015, during which time further steady progress has been made by Transcribe Bentham volunteers.

13,351 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially transcribed, an increase of 28 on this time last week. Of these transcripts, 12,358 (92%) have been checked and approved by Transcribe Bentham staff. A substantial number of partially-transcribed manuscripts have been submitted, so once we have been through these the approval percentage should increase somewhat.

The more detailed state of progress is as follows:

Thank you, as always, to everyone who has contributed to Transcribe Bentham during the last seven days. It remains as greatly appreciated as ever  by all of us here at Bentham HQ.

Welcome along to the progress update for the period 4 to 10 July 2015, during which time further steady progress has been made by Transcribe Bentham volunteers.

13,323 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 37 on this time last week. Of these transcripts, 12,346 (92%) have been checked and approved by TB staff.

The more detailed state of progress is as follows:

Thank you, as always, to everyone who has so generously donated their time to Transcribe Bentham during the last seven days. It is enormously appreciated by us all.

Since the start of 2013 we – we being the Bentham Project, the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) – have participated in the exciting EC-funded tranScriptorium project with some fantastic colleagues from around Europe. The tranScriptorium consortium’s key aim is to develop and further handwritten text recognition technology which can index, search, and transcribe historic manuscript images.

When we were invited to take part in the project way back in 2012, the idea that a machine might be able to automatically transcribe a Bentham manuscript seemed, to us – knowing very little about HTR – a little fanciful. And yet here we are, with experiments carried out by our colleagues showing transcription word error rates of between 15% and 8% for some manuscripts, admittedly on some of the less complex Bentham papers, but remarkable nevertheless.

Our main task in tranScriptorium is to bring this technology to users, by developing and testing a crowdsourced transcription platform, known as TSX. This platform, put together by ULCC, incorporates the HTR technology and puts the user firmly in control of it, letting you take part in three interconnected ways depending upon your level of experience, preference, and/or amount of available free time.

In the first instance you can transcribe and encode a manuscript as you would do in Transcribe Bentham, though while taking advantage of useful features such as the segmentation of manuscript images into lines, and colour-coded TEI mark-up making it more straightforward to distinguish between it and the text of your transcript.

TSX: transcription and encoding

If you are new to transcription or don’t have much time to spare, you might like to request from the HTR engine a full transcript of a given manuscript. As it is unlikely that any HTR transcript will ever be entirely right, you can then correct it against the image.

TSX: HTR transcript correction

Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, is the facility to request from the HTR engine suggestions for certain words.There is nothing more frustrating when transcribing to come across a word (or several words!) which you can’t decipher, and then losing the flow and context of what follows. Being able to ask the HTR engine for possible suggestions could help fill in at least some of these gaps and reduce the level of frustration when trying to decipher just what Bentham wrote.

TSX: word suggestions

If you would like to try out transcribing Bentham manuscripts using TSX and its HTR technology, please do visit the website. (TSX
currently works best running in Chrome on Windows 7 and upwards. There are known issues with it running on MacOS – please do bear with us).

We must stress that this HTR technology could never replace volunteer transcribers or their superb work, but it may help to make their life a little easier. Future development of the platform will include improving the way in which word suggestions are delivered to users, addition of a user page to keep track of your contributions, and introducing a what-you-see-is-what-you-get transcription interface in which the TEI mark-up is hidden from view, leaving you to concentrate on transcription alone. A forthcoming follow-on project to tranScriptorium also promises many more exciting developments, but that’s for another day…

We are very excited about the potential for HTR in widening access to digitised manuscript material, and hope that it – and the Transkribus infrastructure and tool developed by our colleagues at the University of Innsbruck, on which TSX runs – will support scholars and institutions in establishing their own crowdsourcing initiatives.

We hope in the meantime that you enjoy trying out TSX. Please do let us know if you have any feedback on it (good or bad!)