It’s hard to believe it but September marks the 8th birthday of Transcribe Bentham!  And we have something else to celebrate this month too…

It is with great pleasure that we can announce that a large number of volunteers will be credited for the first time in the latest volumes due to be published by the Bentham Project.

Since the initiative began in September 2010, Transcribe Bentham volunteers have put an enormous amount of effort into transcribing Bentham’s writings and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

The thousands upon thousands of volunteer transcripts constitute a unique online resource but they also feed directly into the work of Bentham Project researchers who are editing Bentham’s writings for publication as The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.  Transcripts produced by volunteers mean that researchers do not have to transcribe everything from scratch – they have an accurate first draft for further editing.  The accuracy and efficency of volunteer transcription is discussed further in our latest article published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and written by Tim Causer, Kris Grint, Anna-Maria Sichani and Melissa Terras.

Pre-publication volumes of two volumes of Bentham’s Collected Works are now available in open access, in advance of their forthcoming publication by Oxford University Press.

• Writings on Political Economy, vol. III: Preventive Police, edited by Dr Michael Quinn
• Writings on Australia, edited by Dr Tim Causer

11 volunteers have been credited in Writings on Political Economy, vol. III (see p. viii of the ‘Editorial Introduction’).

34 volunteers have been credited in Writings on Australia (see the ‘Editorial Introductions’ to ‘History of Jeremy Bentham’s dealings with Lord Pelham’, p. v; ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’, p. viii; ‘Second Letter to Lord Pelham’, pp. vi-vii; ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, p. vi; and ‘A Plea for the Constitution’, p. ix).

Both volumes can be consulted freely online and will interest anyone intrigued by Bentham’s ideas on economics, crime and colonies.

Writings on Political Economy, vol. III contains some of Bentham’s drafts from the later 1790s relating to the reform of the policing of the River Thames and the establishment of a Board of Police in London to administer a licensing system for the sale of second hand goods.

Writings on Australia consists of seven texts, four of which are made available for the first time. Six of the texts are intimately connected to Bentham’s attempt to persuade the British government to build his panopticon penitentiary. They include the ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’ and ‘A Plea for the Constitution’, which were highly influential philosophical and legal critiques of convict transportation and the New South Wales penal colony, and were tools by which, in 1802-3, Bentham hoped to force the government to proceed with the establishment of the panopticon.

The seventh text, ‘Colonization Company Proposal’, which was written in 1831, effectively constitutes Bentham’s commentary on the National Colonization Society’s Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia.

‘A Direct South View of the Town of Sydney taken from the brow of the hill leading to the flag staff’, from ‘Account of the English Colony of New South Wales’ by David Collins, on which Bentham drew extensively when writing on Australia in 1802-3.

The Bentham Project is tired (but happy!) this week, as we spent the weekend taking part in our first Hackathon.  It was an inspiring few days and we came away hugely impressed by the useful and creative digital research tools that our hackers produced over the course of a weekend.

The Bentham Hackathon was held in partnership with the technology company IBM, along with the support of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and UCL Innovation and Enterprise.  It was designed as a collaborative and open event where participants could work together to explore how digital tools can help us to research Bentham’s philosophy.

The Hackathon took place over one evening and two full days between 20 and 22 October 2017 and brought together coders, developers, computer scientists, digital humanists, humanities researchers and some of the volunteer transcribers from Transcribe Bentham.

By the Saturday morning, the participants had formed 6 teams who were ready to #hackBentham.  They were working on the following challenges set out by the Bentham Project:

1. How can we use keyword searching to explore Bentham’s writings?
2. Can we use technology to decipher Bentham’s difficult handwriting?
3. Can we build a user-friendly interface for navigating and transcribing documents?
4. Can we build a more user-friendly version of the Transcribe Bentham crowdsourcing platform?

The attendees had a large amount of data to work with: thousands of images of Bentham’s manuscripts and transcripts of their content, metadata for the entirety of the Bentham papers held both at UCL and the British Library and various printed editions of Bentham’s writings and correspondence.

IBM provided access to their Bluemix platform where the hackers could experiment with the Object Store, Watson Knowledge Studio and Node-RED applications.  IBM also used this platform to pre-process some of the Bentham data so that the participants could get to work quickly.

The teams worked diligently all weekend, with the support of members of the Bentham Project and developers from IBM.  Coding and discussion went on until 8:30pm on the Saturday evening, fuelled by pizza, coffee and Coca Cola!

On Sunday afternoon it was time for the teams to submit and present their final outputs.  IBM generously provided prize money of £1000 for the event and it was up to a panel of judges from the Bentham Project, IBM and UCL Innovation and Enterprise to award the spoils!

First up was the ‘Bencharms’ team, who used IBM Cloudant to produce a more attractive version of the Transcribe Bentham Transcription Desk, with enhanced functionalities like allowing users to see more easily whether a page has already been transcribed.  They also had the idea of a mobile app where users could contribute to Transcribe Bentham by transcribing single words.

Presentation from ‘Bencharms’ team.

Team ‘XScribe’ put together a searching interface for the Bentham papers, where users would be able to look for keywords but also see whether certain manuscripts have already been transcribed.  They also worked on image extraction and segmentation to make it easier for transcribers to match the line of their text transcription to the corresponding line in the image.  Again, these ideas have the potential to speed up the transcription process significantly.

Presentation from ‘XScribe’ team.

Two teams ‘Bentham Budds’ and ‘Benthamligraphy’ chose to work on a language model that could predict the words that Bentham would be most likely to use.  They used Tensorflow and IBM’s Node-RED software for machine learning to train a model using a sample of transcripts of Bentham material.  Such a model could increase productivity of Transcribe Bentham volunteers and Bentham Project researchers as Bentham’s handwriting is often so difficult to read.

Presentation from ‘Benthamligraphy’ team.

‘QSP’ was a team which included two volunteer transcribers from Transcribe Bentham and they decided to work on a sandpit area to help orientate new users of the platform.  Their ‘Box 999’ area included helpful videos and links for new transcribers and also allowed users to practice transcribing pages and get immediate feedback on any errors.  This was a fitting suggestion as we find it difficult to attract new volunteers to Transcribe Bentham, possibly because people can be daunted by the prospect of transcribing a complete page on their own.

Presentation from QSP team.

But the winning team was ‘Bentham’s Head’!  Their fantastic site called Locate Bentham not only has the potential to facilitate existing research questions but could also generate new areas of enquiry.  The team created an interface where users can perform keyword searches on Bentham transcripts, view a Google map of the places mentioned in Bentham’s correspondence, trace the development of Bentham’s ideas over time, examine Bentham’s social network based on his list of correspondents and even analyse Bentham’s personality using IBM Watson Personality Insights.  This was an amazing breadth of resources, embedded in a functional and attractive interface.  Well done team!

Presentation from ‘Bentham’s Head’ team.

The Bentham Project had little idea what could happen at a Hackathon but we were struck by the concentration and creativity of all the teams.  A big thank you to everyone who took part and to our partners at IBM, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and UCL Innovation and Enterprise.

We want to continue to develop some of the ideas and connections made at the Hackathon; to improve both Transcribe Bentham and the digital research tools at the Bentham Project’s disposal.  IBM have kindly allowed participants continued access to the Bluemix platform in the short-term and we are planning to get involved in the upcoming Learn Hack at UCL on 24-26 November.  Watch this space for more info!

The Bentham Project has a vacancy for a Transcription Assistant to work with Professor Philip Schofield, Professor Margot Finn, and Dr Tim Causer on a new edition of Jeremy Bentham’s writings on Australia, containing three major texts: Panopticon versus New South Wales, A Plea for the Constitution, and Colonization Society Proposal. There will be a variety of tasks, including transcription of manuscripts, correcting of transcripts, proof-reading, and the encoding and preparation of online texts. More details about the research programme can be found at http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=AH/M009548/1.

The post will suit a research student working in History, Legal History, or a cognate field.

It is expected that work will be offered for one day per week (7 hours). The salary is £12.27 per hour.

Applications, consisting of a covering letter and CV, should be sent to Dr Tim Causer, Bentham Project, UCL Laws, 38-50 Bidborough House, London WC1H 9BT, or t.causer@ucl.ac.uk

The deadline for applications is Sunday 18 September 2016.

It’s been a few months since the last update about the ongoing editing of Bentham’s writings on Australia. In the intervening period I’ve mostly been researching and writing editorial notes for Panopticon versus New Wales and A Plea for the Constitution to illuminate Bentham’s various allusions throughout the texts.

In writing and researching the First Letter to Lord Pelham (one half of Panopticon versus New South Wales) in 1802, Bentham sought out as much information as possible about the convict colony of New South Wales. Though he relied in the main upon historical accounts and official correspondence among Bentham’s other acquisitions was a short letter dated 7 October 1800, ‘from a female pen, as well as to a female eye’, which he cited as evidence of the immorality supposedly prevalent in New South Wales (p. 19). He quoted a portion of the letter which described how the new Governor of New South Wales, Philip Gidley King, would have to ‘pay some attention to the morals and instruction of the rising generation, to which none has hitherto been given; for certainly, if we ever hope to see worth or honesty in this settlement, we must look to them for it, and not the present degenerate race.’

Bentham was oddly coy about the letter’s providence, noting that for ‘authentication sake, designation will (I suppose) be regarded as indispensable; but where that sex is concerned, the most reserved mode that can be thought of, is the most respectful and the best.’ There the authorship of the letter might have remained a mystery but, as ever when it comes to Bentham, his manuscripts are fortunately more revealing. In an unpublished draft of the First Letter to Lord Pelham, Bentham wrote that ‘the Lady’s Husband—a Soldier—[was] the first man in rank under the Governor’ (UCL Bentham Papers, Box xciv, f. 335v). The Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales in October 1800 was Lieutenant-Colonel William Paterson (1755–1810), making the author of the letter his wife, Elizabeth (née Driver), one of the founders of the Sydney Orphans’ School and committee member of the Female Orphans’ Institution.

Elizabeth Paterson’s letter—or perhaps an extract from it— is held among the British Library’s Bentham Papers (Additional Manuscripts 33,453, folios 423–24) and a similar note to the quotation above about its authorship, in pencil and in Bentham’s hand, is written at the end of the letter. Furthermore, on the reverse of the letter it is stated that it was from ‘Mrs Patterson [sic] Port Jackson to Mrs B. Q.S.P.’—‘Mrs B’ being Maria Sophia Bentham (1765–1858), the wife of Jeremy’s younger brother, Samuel (1757–1831). This was not the only occasion that Jeremy tapped into Samuel and Maria Sophia’s network when writing Panopticon versus New South Wales: he also drew upon a letter dated 20 May 1799 from Samuel’s friend, John Hunter (1737–1821), Governor of New South Wales from 1795 to 1800.

As well as her remarks upon colonial morality (very much written from the point of view of the official class), Elizabeth Paterson’s letter also reveals anxiety about the security of the colony in the wake of several hundred convicts having arrived from Ireland, many of whom were apparently involved in the 1798 United Irishmen rising. In September 1800, a month before Paterson put pen to paper, a nebulous ‘plot’ had been uncovered in which some Irish convicts were supposed to have been ready to resort to armed revolt. Paterson wrote of how ‘for these last six months we have been under apprehensions’ of a rising, but as the rumours were unconfirmed ‘no steps [were taken] to prevent their designs’ until 28 September. This was the day apparently ‘fixed for the destruction of the Military and principal families at Parramatta, a considerable Settlement 15 Miles from [Sydney]’. Thirty ‘Ringleaders’ were arrested and questioned and ‘the greatest part confessed the horrid plot’ and, as a result, a number of men were ordered to be flogged and/or exiled to Norfolk Island. Even though the ‘plot’ had been prevented, Paterson remained concerned that the military force in the colony was insufficient and that even after ‘our critical situation’ became known back in London, there was still the prospect of more Irish prisoners being transported to New South Wales.

You can see the letter, and the page of the draft of Panopticon versus New South Wales below. In the meantime, the editorial work continues apace. The annotation of the printed versions of Panopticon versus New South Wales and A Plea for the Constitution is at quite an advanced stage, and transcripts of manuscripts from Box 116 , produced in the main by TB volunteers, are also being checked, and the quality is extraordinarily high. Once this checking is complete, we will begin to compare the draft versions of these two texts with the printed versions, and see just what Bentham decided to leave out from the final versions. But that is something for a future update…

Elizabeth Paterson to Maria Sophia Bentham, 7 Oct 1800 (p.1)
British Library Add. MS 33,453, fo. 423r

Elizabeth Paterson to Maria Sophia Bentham, 7 Oct 1800 (p.1)
British Library Add. MS 33,453, fo. 423v

Elizabeth Paterson to Maria Sophia Bentham, 7 Oct 1800 (p.1)
British Library Add. MS 33,453, fo. 424r

UCL Bentham Papers, Box xciv, fo. 335v

Hey everyone, here is our progress update for the week. Thank you to all of our transcribers this week for working so hard.

16,082 manuscript pages have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 58 on last week’s total. Of these transcripts, 15,246 (94%) have been checked and approved by TB staff.

The more detailed progress chart is as follows: