Greetings all from Linz, a beautiful city by the shores of the Danube which is home to the Ars Electronica, whose gleaming home is at the centre of this annual festival of digital art, technology and culture.

The Ars Electronica Centre, Linz

I arrived early this afternoon, somewhat tired after the travelling, but have had a brief look around at what’s going on down at the Brucknerhaus. After collecting my artist’s pass, I came across the Interface Cultures exhibition on the theme of ‘unuselessness’: exhibits include a faux-Russian roulette game which plays random pieces of video, and a ‘squeezer’, which can be attached to a television or any audio device – the harder you squeeze, the higher the pitch of the audio becomes. My personal favourite, however, is QMusiQ, which the artist describes as ‘digital cow music’ played by eight Simmentals.

Just round the corner is the Digital Communities exhibition, featuring all the winning projects and those given an honorary mention in that category of this year’s Prix Ars Electronica. The exhibition takes the form of text and images, describing in detail the diverse range of projects recognised – including our very own Transcribe Bentham! Sadly, photography is not allowed inside the Bruckherhaus, but hopefully some official photographs will appear on the Ars Electronica Flickr feed. There are also four internet-connected computers nearby, so anyone inspired to have a look at the projects can get stuck in.

Tomorrow is set to be very exciting. I’ll have more time to visit the various exhibitions and events, and in the evening is one of the festival highlights: the Ars Electronica Gala, recognising and presenting awards to the winning porjects. I’ll be representing the Bentham Project there, and have been ironing my shirt and polishing my cufflinks in anticipation.

More to follow tomorrow!

Austria’s public broadcaster, ORF, recently carried out a radio interview with Transcribe Bentham staff, as part of a series of five-minute programmes discussing the winning projects at this year’s Prix Ars Electronica.

The Transcribe Bentham episode was broadcast today at 15.55GMT. A programme description is available, and you can listen on demand to the feature here.

As regular readers know, the award-winning Transcribe Bentham Transcription Desk was programmed and put together by a highly-talented team at the University of London Computer Centre, led by Richard Davis. Those who are thinking about crowdsourcing their own manuscript collection will no doubt be interested to learn that Richard has recently made available the code for the Transcribe Bentham MediaWiki plugins here. They comprise the transcription toolbar, support for TEI markup, and support for viewing images. There are accompanying instructions on how to make the code work, and details of other plugins used to produce the Transcription Desk.

To use these plugins, you – or someone on your team – must be familiar with the installation and setting up of MediaWiki on a web server. You should also be prepared for the possibility that some settings within the code are specific to Transcribe Bentham, and be able to reconfigure them for your own purposes.

You may wish to consult Richard’s instructions which will no doubt prove far more helpful than this blogpost. We hope the plugins will be of use to those wishing to use them!

(with thanks to Richard and his team for putting this together)

In May the Historical Association celebrated its local history month. A series of events held across the country focused on exploring the history of the local community. In recognition of this celebration, the Bentham Project organised its own series of public events, Bentham in the Community, which aimed at situating Bentham’s life and work within a local history context.

Bentham was a Londoner who had a significant impact on his home town. Born in 1748, he grew up in the hustle and bustle of the diverse east end. He went as a boarder to Westminster School when he was seven; and on his return from Oxford in 1763, he lived at Lincoln’s Inn. From 1792 until his death in 1832, his home was at Westminster where he was dubbed the ‘hermit of Queen Square Place’. From 1814 his neighbours were James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, who exercised on the gym constructed in Bentham’s garden, where Bentham also kept a pet pig. Bentham and his circle wrote extensively on political, legal and educational reform; their ideas contributed to the foundation of the University of London in 1826.

The Bentham Project arranged three events funded by a Beacon Bursary for public engagement to explore Bentham’s connections to his environment and to start a dialogue between academic and amateur historians.   The first event was held at UCL and the second at the Women’s Library in Spitalfields, near where Jeremy was born. At these events Bentham scholars, London historians and local experts discussed Bentham and London with a public audience. The third event was a guided walk around the parts of London with which Bentham was associated.

Bentham in the Community also aimed at raising awareness of Transcribe Bentham. Audience members were invited to try out our transcription exercise on computer workstations. We hoped that by reaching out to the public, our Transcribe Bentham community would move beyond the digital and become more personal.

We received lots of positive feedback from the events and we are so grateful to our participants and our attendees for helping to make the programme so stimulating and enjoyable! We hope that Bentham in the Community will be the first of many public engagement events aimed at bringing Bentham studies to a wider audience.

• Blog post on Bentham and UCL event by invited speaker Mike Paterson, Director of London Historians

• Blog post by Kathleen McIlvenna, one of our attendees.

We are delighted to announce that Transcribe Bentham has been honoured with an Award of Distinction in the Digital Communities category of the highly prestigious Prix Ars Electronica. In each of its seven categories, the Prix juries award one overall Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction, and twelve Honorary Mentions.

Part of the annual Ars Electronica festival, the Prix is the world’s foremost digital arts competition and has recognised many superb projects since it began in 1987. Former winners include Peter Gabriel, Tim Berners-Lee, Aphex Twin, and the animation team responsible for the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. The Digital Communities section was won in 2004 by Wikipedia, and in 2009 Wikileaks was the recipient of the same Award of Distinction now bestowed upon Transcribe Bentham.

Needless to say, all involved in Transcribe Bentham were thrilled to receive this news and it has been a challenge to keep it under our hats until now, after the competition winners have been announced to the press. We would like to put on record our gratitude to the Prix Ars Electronica organisers and jury members for this award, which also carries a cash prize of €5,000. The money will be used to digitise and make available the rest of the manuscripts relating to Bentham’s Panopticon prison scheme. You can also read Jeremy’s reaction to the news here.

We consider this award an endorsement of the work of the project team in making available Bentham’s manuscripts for anyone, anywhere in the world to transcribe. We hope that we have helped to publicise the discipline of palaeography, the burgeoning collaborative manuscript transcription community, and generate interest in Bentham and his time by putting together a project in which academics and volunteers collaborate to both produce humanities research, and ensure the long-term preservation of UCL’s Bentham Papers collection.

Transcribe Bentham would not exist without the highly talented people comprising the project team. Hearty thanks are due to Professor Philip Schofield, Dr Valerie Wallace, Dr Justin Tonra, and Dr Tim Causer of the Bentham Project (past and present); Richard Davis and his team of fiendishly clever programmers at the University of London Computer Centre, who are responsible for crafting the Transcription Desk; Tony Slade at UCL Design, Photography and Web Services for the painstaking task of producing high-quality images of the manuscripts; Martin Moyle of UCL Library Services for hosting the Bentham digital repository; and Dr Melissa Terras and Dr Claire Warwick of UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities for invaluable advice and support.

(We would also like to thank our parents, siblings, agents and pets, but won’t for fear of turning this into a tear-flecked Oscars-style meltdown).

Just as importantly, the award is testament to the hard work and efforts of all those volunteers who have contributed to the success of the project during the last nine months. They have produced well over 1,300 transcripts, of which more than 80% are complete. This award is as much in their honour as ours, and we hope that the resulting publicity will assist in recruiting more volunteers to the cause.

This year’s Ars Electronica Festival takes place from 1 to 6 September in the Austrian town of Linz, with its theme being ‘Origin’, and is being run in co-operation with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and with a particular focus upon its ground-breaking research. All of this year’s award winning entries will be on display for the public to see, discover, and explore at the Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz from 1 September.

Dr Tim Causer will travel to Linz to attend the Ars Electronica Gala to receive the prize at the award ceremony on behalf of the project team and its volunteers, and the Ars Electronica Forum where winning projects will be presented and discussed to festival attendees and the press.

We will update this blog in the coming days as more news and information, such as the jury citation, comes in. UCL’s Media Relations team have also issued a press release regarding the news, which can be found here. In the meantime, we hope you are just as thrilled as us about the news!

Update, 2 June 2011: Here is the Ars Electronica press release with a full list of Golden Nica and Awards of Distinction winners, and those who received an honorary mention. Congratulations to our fellow Digital Communities Award of Distinction winner X_MSG, which is pioneering and inexpensive method of communication which aims to promote education and cooperation among sex workers and activists. Also a huge well-done to the category and Golden Nica winner Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente (Smart Citizen Foundation), a non-profit organisation which promotes transparency and accountability in South American politics, an endeavour of which Bentham would have greatly approved. Transcribe Bentham is in good company!