Working on Transcribe Bentham…

We have been lucky enough to have Klaudia Lleshi working with us over the past few weeks as a student intern and we are very grateful for all her help.  On her last day, Klaudia would like to share her experience of working on Transcribe Benham:

‘I have been working with the Transcribe Bentham project team as part of my work placement for the past six weeks. I am currently studying MSc Digital Humanities at UCL. The course has given me an opportunity to build on both my computing and technological skills as well as learn more about how different digital aspects are applied in humanities and why. Over the course of these six weeks I have had the chance to do several different types of jobs. I have transcribed some of Bentham’s work, although I probably still have a long way to go to actually be able to understand all of his handwriting, but practice makes perfect. I have also helped in writing the blog for the statistics of the project each week. I have updated the Transcribe Bentham blog as well as looking in to more recent news about Bentham, his work and the Transcribe Bentham project. Having already had some experience working on blogs previously, it was nice to get back to it and be able to update the content of the blog/website. I have worked with Oxygen to create XML based files of completed transcripts each week that will eventually be used to display these files as part of documents on a website that will be available for anyone to access. This has given me the chance build on the little knowledge I already had about Oxygen and practice creating different file types. I have had the chance to do several tasks as part of this work experience, with everyday being different. Getting the chance to digitise some of Bentham’s work by taking the photographs of the papers was great and then being able to use Adobe Bridge to edit the images so that they are in the correct format ready for upload also showed me the process of digitisation that they go through before they are finally uploaded ready for transcribing.

It has been a lovely six weeks with the Transcribe Benham Team, it has been good for me to work in the different areas of the project and learn how it all comes together. The team has been great and I’m sure the Transcribe Bentham Project will continue to grow and develop further with the all the new things they have planned for the future.’

Klaudia Lleshi