Transcribe Bentham launches!

Today sees the launch of the Transcribe Bentham Transcription Desk, an online tool designed to harness the efforts of all Bentham fans – whether schoolchildren, history enthusiasts, academics or armchair philosophers – to bring his work into the digital age and the world at large.

The Transcription Desk allows participants to transcribe material from facsimile images of Bentham’s previously unpublished manuscripts. The resulting transcripts will be included in a freely-accessible database of Bentham’s Manuscripts at UCL, and will assist in the preparation of future printed volumes of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham at the Bentham Project.

This is the first major crowdsourcing transcription project which we hope will provide interesting results on the nature of community engagement.

The project is administered by the Bentham Project and UCLDH and funded by the AHRC.

The Transcription Desk is now open to the public and we encourage everyone to have a go at transcribing Jeremy Bentham’s papers! All  contributions and all thoughts on anything relating to Bentham and the project in general are welcome. You are warmly encouraged to explore the site, create a profile and post comments on our discussion board. You can also track the progress of transcription by viewing the Benthamometer.

We hope you will get involved!

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Valerie Wallace is Research Associate on the Transcribe Bentham Project.