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.

 

Last month, I set a new challenge for our volunteer transcribers.  Could we focus attention on certain boxes to try to get them completely transcribed?

Happily, our volunteers rose to the challenge and set about transcribing.  I’m here to give a progress update and to invite everyone to continue transcribing so we can build on our first milestone.

The transcription challenge brought lots of new visitors to the site, tempted several new transcribers to start work and encouraged several old friends to join back in.  This is exactly what we like to see!

As shown in the below table, at last count volunteers have transcribed 63 pages of the targeted material.  Thank you all!

Box Number	No. of pages transcribed
14	3
50	15
70	21
72	4
95	6
537 and 538	14
TOTAL	63

 

Most of the 63 pages are completely transcribed; some are still awaiting review from the Transcribe Bentham administrators.  Having worked with many of our volunteers for years, we are confident that these transcripts are of a high standard.

Let’s keep the transcription challenge going and see how far we can get.  Outstanding material can be found in the below tables – there are still pages from Boxes 50, 70, 72, 95, 537 and 538 to be transcribed. Box 14 is now very nearly complete.  The only remaining pages are written in shorthand, which cannot be transcribed in full in our current system.

I know that many of these pages are rather difficult – but hopefully transcribers will be able to work on a page here and there, alongside their usual material.

I am also hard at work preparing our next transcription challenge, which will be centred on material that is likely to be of more immediate use to researchers at the Bentham Project.

As ever, I am amazed by everyone’s efforts and I look forward to seeing how transcription progresses.  If you have any questions or comments about the challenge, please let me know by email (transcribe.bentham@ucl.ac.uk).

Box 50

Page Number	Content	Difficulty of handwriting	Foreign language?
JB/050/174/001	Legal procedure (table form)	Difficult	French

Box 70

Page Number	Content	Difficulty of handwriting	Foreign language?
JB/070/149/001	Laws in general	Moderate	Latin?
JB/070/234/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/237/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/238/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/245/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/246/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/247/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/249/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/252/002	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/255/001	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/256/002	Larceny	Difficult
JB/070/261/001	Larceny	Difficult

Box 72

Page Number	Content	Difficulty of handwriting	Foreign language?
JB/072/004/001	Offences against person (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/006/001	Offences against person (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/006/002	Offences against person (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/007/001	Offences against property (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/007/002	Offences against property (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/008/001	Offences against property (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/008/002	Offences against property (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/009/001	Penal code (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/010/001	Offences against revenue (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/010/002	Offences against revenue (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/011/001	Offences against trade (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/012/001	Offences against morality (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/014/001	Offences against public property (short table form)	Moderate
JB/072/016/001	Offences against government (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/016/002	Offences against government (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/018/001	Offences against national peace (short table form)	Moderate
JB/072/019/001	Offences against the coin (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/090/001	Offences against property (table form)	Moderate
JB/072/106/002	Penal code	Moderate
JB/072/183/002	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/183/003	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/183/004	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/184/001	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/186/001	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/215/001	Penal code (table form)	Difficult	French
JB/072/216/001	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/216/002	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/216/003	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/216/004	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/217/001	Penal code	Difficult	French
JB/072/219/001	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/219/002	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/220/001	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/220/0 02	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/220/003	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/220/004	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/221/001	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/221/002	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/221/003	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/221/004	Penal code	Moderate	French
JB/072/222/001	Penal code	Moderate	French

Box 95

Page Number	Content	Difficulty of handwriting	Foreign language?
JB/095/050/001	Turnpike act (table form)	Difficult
JB/095/059/001	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/060/001	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/071/002	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/077/002	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/079/001	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/079/002	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/096/001	Turnpike act	Moderate
JB/095/097/001	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/105/001	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/109/001	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/110/001	Turnpike act	Difficult
JB/095/112/004	Turnpike act	Difficult

Boxes 537 and 538

Page Number	Content	Difficulty of handwriting	Foreign language?
JB/537/363/002	Jeremy to Samuel Bentham	Difficult	French
JB/537/364/001	Jeremy to Samuel Bentham	Difficult	French
JB/537/364/002	Jeremy to Samuel Bentham	Difficult	French
JB/537/365/001	Jeremy to Samuel Bentham	Difficult	French
JB/538/412/001	Jeremy to Samuel Bentham	Moderate	French
JB/538/412/002	Jeremy to Samuel Bentham	Moderate	French

 

I’m sure most of you saw our fabulous news about the complete digitisation of Bentham’s manuscripts.  Over 95,000 images of Bentham’s writings from UCL Special Collections and The British Library are now available in digital form – and we thought this was worthy of a bit of a celebration!

On 6 June 2018 about 30 of our friends and supporters joined us for a party in Bentham House, the newly refurbished home of the Bentham Project and the UCL Faculty of Laws.

As the wine flowed, Bentham Project staff mingled with colleagues from The British Library, UCL Digital Media Services, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library and further afield.  We were also delighted to welcome four volunteer transcribers to the party – this was possibly the first time that we have had several volunteers in the same room!  Annette Brindle (Annieb2), Simon Croft (S.D.Croft), Diane Folan (Diane_Folan) and Gill Hague (ohsoldgirl) were all in attendance and took the opportunity to share some transcription tips and tricks with each other.

 

Of course, you can’t have a celebration without a few speeches.  Professor Philip Schofield, director of the Bentham Project, gave an overview of the history of Transcribe Bentham: from its origins in 2010 to our present-day experiments with Handwritten Text Recognition technology.  Professor Melissa Terras, formerly of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, now at the University of Edinburgh, spoke about how important Transcribe Bentham has become in the wider digital humanities landscape.  It was then up to me to convey our gratitude to everyone who supports and contributes to Transcribe Bentham – especially our loyal transcribers!

Happily we also received multiple messages of congratulations from volunteers and academics who were unable to attend the party.  We include them below to give a flavour of Transcribe Bentham’s international standing.  With thanks to everyone who sent their good wishes!

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Thanks to Transcribe Bentham’s staff, volunteers and supporters for sharing so many of your lessons learnt, for the benefit of many others interested in the potential for crowdsourcing and online participation in work on cultural heritage collections. Congratulations on achieving this milestone, and here’s to many more in the future.

Cheers,

Mia Ridge, The British Library

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Transcribe Bentham is not just an inspiration for all digitization projects: It also demonstrates, that highly demanding tasks–like transcribing and tagging–can be done efficiently and collaboratively in the digital age. Congrats and Chapeau.

Tobias Hodel, University of Zurich

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To all involved in the Bentham Project, I’m so sorry I can’t be with you at the celebration.  It’s wonderful to see all the volunteers taking part in transcribing Bentham.  More than 20,000 pages of Bentham’s writing transcribed by volunteers — this must be productive of utility for those who are freely choosing to do the transcribing, for the wider audience whose reading of Bentham’s unknown work is thereby facilitated, and in the long run, I hope, for those who will be affected by changes in our thinking and policies that stem from a better understanding of Bentham. 

Peter Singer, Princeton University and University of Melbourne

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I would add that I enjoy the Bentham Project for three reasons: 1. puzzling out the letters on the page, 2. fitting the words together to make sense, (rather like a cryptic crossword), 3. the occasional gem of insight into life and thought from the early nineteenth century.

Keith Thompson, Transcribe Bentham volunteer

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The news about the completion of the digitisation of the main collections is wonderful, and many congratulations to all concerned (a huge number of people, of course!).

Thanks for the invitation to the event on 6 June. Unfortunately I can’t be there, which is a pity. I’d like to say I’ll be with you in spirit, but I think Bentham would disapprove.

Roger Crisp, University of Oxford

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I enjoyed the opportunity to participate in the project. I had completed a Masters in Criminology and when I read about it, I was keen to help. It was fascinating to have access to the originals and to be able to make a contribution, however small to making Bentham’s work accessible to the public.  Congratulations to all involved. It proves that together we can do great things. 

Olga Núñez Miret, Transcribe Bentham volunteer

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When I joined Transcribe Bentham in 2010, I could not have anticipated the significant impact it would have on Bentham Studies, Digital Humanities, and Citizen Science, and I feel honoured and grateful to have been part of the project at its outset.

Congratulations to all—staff and volunteers—who have contributed to making Transcribe Bentham such a noteworthy scholarly resource and an important contribution to knowledge.

Justin Tonra, Research Associate on Transcribe Bentham (2010)

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During my PhD, I went to the Bentham Project and I had to get through some difficult pages of Bentham’s handwriting… One day, I find a musical score on the top of one of Bentham’s manuscript and then, written on the side of the next one, an unfinished score with more notes. At this moment, I thought: that’s great I will be able to “hear” Bentham’s handwriting now and even to listen what he likes…

I don’t know if one day we will be able to identify the source of this score but I think it illustrates the experience of transcribing Bentham’s material… you discover unexpected things which, at first sight, seems partially irrelevant, and, then, you begin to think that there is a beauty in it (until the mystery of the score is solved!).

Before the complete digitalization of 100,000 Bentham pages, I used to look at Transcribe Bentham and I was happy to discover the new good quotes and progress made thanks to the volunteers (thanks Tim!).  Now that this is done, more discovery will (hopefully) happen and this is great news for history of political thought and classical utilitarianism!

Benjamin Bourcier, Université Catholique de Lille

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If you have any questions about the digitisation or would like to view images that have not yet been put online, feel free to contact us.

Funding for the digitisation was provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UCL Digital Media Services and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.  The Bentham Project is also recognised as a British Academy Research Project.

We were honoured to be invited to present on 19th March 2018 at a UCL event celebrating the participation of women in citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.  Representation of the people in science: women in civic and citizen science brought together an all-female panel of researchers, citizen scientists and volunteers to discuss their different projects.

I gave the audience an overview of Transcribe Bentham and the benefits it brings for scholarship, access to historical material and our volunteers.  Since September 2010, there have been 639 people who have transcribed something at least once on our site (check out our Hall of Fame!).  But the majority of the transcription on Transcribe Bentham has been carried out by around 30 volunteers.  These volunteers are known as our ‘super-transcribers’ and we typically have between 3 and 5 of these users transcribing every week.  According to our latest user survey, the gender balance of our super-transcribers is actually relatively even: 58% of our super-transcribers are male and 42% are female.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was happy to have one of our most active users alongside me to give her perspective on being a Transcribe Bentham volunteer.  Gill Hague (or ‘ohsoldgirl’) has been contributing to the initiative for many years, transcribing hundreds of pages across that time.  With her permission, I have included an excerpt from her presentation which gives an insight into her experience and some advice for new transcribers:

‘As a freelancer I found I had periods of time where either I was waiting for the phone to ring with news of some work, or I had days on a project where I had nothing specific to do, but I had to be available on the phone at a moments’ notice.   This made it hard to get involved in anything external that required a regular commitment of time, but watching daytime television soon lost its attraction.

In September 2011 I saw a small piece in the Sunday Times about Transcribe Bentham.   With a particular interest in new ways of applying technology – crowdsourcing was a relatively new concept at the time – I was interested to learn more and so logged on to the website.   I had done Economic History at A level so Bentham’s name rang a faint bell and looking at the site I saw parallels with image enabled databases I had previously been involved in developing.   Then we had used OCR to make printed text searchable – here I could see that transcribing made the handwritten text accessible in the same way.   I was encouraged that anyone was welcome to have a go at transcribing, and, after reading the guidance, set out on an initial page.   Submitting this eventually for review, I was very pleased to receive a swift email thanking me for my contribution and encouraging me to do more.

To anyone new to transcribing I would say just have a go.   The handwriting can be challenging but there’s a sense of achievement when you decipher it, and the more you do the easier it becomes.   The more pages you transcribe, the more confident and competent you become with the mark up, and it’s very satisfying when you get it all right and the page renders as you expect.    Once you get your head round the principles it’s really a very logical process.   You’ll get plenty of feedback and encouragement from the Transcribe Bentham team and make a valuable contribution to their work.’

It was great to see another citizen scientist presenting at the event.  Jo Hurford is a local artist and community leader and is part of a group of Euston residents who have made attempts to raise concerns about air quality and the environment in opposition to the plans for the HS2 high-speed railway.  The group worked with Professor Muki Haklay from UCL Extreme Citizen Science who taught them how to measure air quality along proposed construction routes and their findings proved that the impact will be severe.  They also tried to highlight the need to save greenspaces by knitting scarves for trees – you may have seen some of them in Euston Square Gardens.  Jo praised the citizen science movement for helping the residents to arm themselves with facts and keep going no matter what.

We also heard from several researchers who are facilitating other citizen science projects.

Dr Cindy Regalado, also from UCL Extreme Citizen Science reported on the myriad events organised as part of the EU-funded Doing It Together Science initiative, which is designed to engage the public in bio-design and environmental science.  These include workshops, science cafes, film nights and most intriguingly the Stick Insect meeting in Belgium where amateurs and scientists presented and curated an exhibition about stick insects!

 

Dr Alice Bell, science writer and director of communications at climate charity 10:10, spoke to us about two related subjects.  First, she explored the radical science movement of the 1970s, which was arguably one of the first attempts to involve the public in science and change perceptions of the subject.  Second, she talked about her current work in climate change action, helping schools and community groups to set up solar panels  on their own buildings.

 

We were also interested to hear from Professor Sarah Bell, Professor of Environment Engineering at UCL.  Professor Bell is the director of Engineering Exchange, which is a network of engineers and specialists who work to make UCL’s Engineering expertise available for local community projects.  Only 9% of engineers in the UK are women and this presentation suggested that the experience of being a minority might help to explain why female engineers are often more drawn to public engagement and citizen science work.

It was fascinating to gain understanding of the way in which volunteers are engaged in the scientific world and we hope we can develop some closer connections with ongoing citizen science initiatives at UCL.  Thanks to the audience who contributed interesting comments and questions, the organisers at UCL Extreme Citizen Science and and the Doing it Together Science project and to Dr Charlene Jennett, researcher at UCLIC for chairing the event.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 709443.

Our January project update is running a little late, but I hope I’ll be forgiven!

Amongst other things, I’ve been busy preparing the first edition of the Transcribe Bentham newsletter, a new monthly email update on the project.  You can expect to find out about the latest volunteer discoveries, our progress towards our transcription goals and other Bentham-related news and events.  Sign up here.

Coming back to the subject of today’s blog post, I wanted to celebrate the publication of a new article on Transcribe Bentham. ”Making such bargain: Transcribe Bentham and the quality and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced transcription’ has been published in the journal, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (open-access version is coming soon).  It was written by former Transcribe Bentham colleagues Dr Tim Causer, Dr Kris Grint, Dr Anna-Maria Sichani and Professor Melissa Terras.  The article is a detailed statistical evaluation of the quality and efficiency of Transcribe Bentham as a transcription project.  It reveals that we have a lot to be proud of!

We have long known that Transcribe Bentham is ground-breaking in terms of public engagement and access to historical material.  We are working with a fantastic community of volunteers and making thousands of pages of Bentham manuscripts and transcripts freely available online.  This article goes into more depth about other benefits of Transcribe Bentham, in terms of the quality and cost-efficiency of the work done by our volunteers.

The article is a pain-staking study of over 4000 transcripts submitted by Transcribe Bentham volunteers and then checked by Transcribe Bentham staff over a 20 month period.  The team analysed the quality of each submitted transcript and the time taken to review and edit it.  This analysis indicated that the work produced by our volunteers is of a very high quality (as we have always suspected!).  Most of the transcripts submitted on the site required only a handful of editorial changes, and nearly half required no changes at all.  It takes Transcribe Bentham staff an average of only 3.5 minutes to check and approve a page submitted by a volunteer.  So we have empirical evidence that the work of our volunteers is accurate enough to be used in a public database and as basis for further research.

Volunteer transcription is not only accurate, but efficient too.  It is much quicker for Transcribe Bentham staff to check transcripts, than to transcribe them from scratch.  There is also significant potential for cost-avoidance, even if we take into account the fact that the Bentham Project has received significant funding to establish and maintain the initiative.  Moreover, Transcribe Bentham contributes hugely to the ongoing work of the Bentham Project in producing the definitive scholarly edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.  Bentham Project researchers can make use of transcripts produced by volunteers, so they now have a head-start when they are editing Bentham’s papers.  The article also estimates that if our transcribers continue to work at their current rate, Bentham’s papers could be completely transcribed by 2036.  This would be an astonishing achievement, especially considering that the Bentham Project has been working towards this goal since the late 1950s!

We are immensely grateful to our volunteers and do not wish to reduce them to a set of statistics.  Rather, this article is designed to provide evidence of the tangible benefits of crowdsourcing transcription, pointing out the signficant success of Transcribe Bentham and also offering a model for other projects who might like to follow our lead.  It really shows the huge contribution that volunteers are making to Bentham scholarship.

If you have any questions about the article, please contact Dr Tim Causer (Bentham Project, UCL).

If you are interested in finding out more about the history of Transcribe Bentham, you can read other articles at our Publications page.