Moyle, M.; Tonra, J.; Wallace, V.; (2010) Crowdsourcing manuscript transcription: the Transcribe Bentham project. Presented at: LIBER 2010 Annual Conference, Aarhus, Denmark.

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Abstract

UCL Library Services holds 60,000 folios of manuscripts of the philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). A new project, Transcribe Bentham, is using this corpus to test the feasibility of outsourcing the work of manuscript transcription to members of the public. Transcribe Bentham will initially digitise 10,000 folios, and create a suite of transcription training tools. A simple interface will be devised to allow registered contributors to take temporary ownership of manuscript images and to supply transcription text for final approval by UCL experts. If approved, the transcripts will be stored as TEI-encoded documents, alongside the manuscript images, in UCL's public Digital Collections repository. The repository will feed into an over-arching Bentham Project 'hub' site, which, in addition to housing the transcription interface, will offer open access to the images, transcripts and a Bentham-based 'Ideas Bank'. The project makes innovative use of traditional material. It will stimulate public engagement with UCL's scholarly archive collections and the challenges of manuscript transcription; it will raise the profile of the work and thought of Jeremy Bentham; and it will make new digital resources available to professional researchers. The project is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, led by the UCL Bentham Project, in collaboration with UCL Library Services and UCL Department of Information Studies. It is part of the work of the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

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