Transcribe Bentham

Transcription

University College London is the custodian of Jeremy Bentham’s corpse, or at least some of it. It is also the custodian of Bentham’s corpus, or at least most of it. UCL’s library has 60,000 folios written by Jeremy Bentham. It is the purpose of the Bentham Project to edit these folios and produce for posterity the collected works of Jeremy Bentham, aiming to produce the volumes as Bentham would have intended. Since Bentham destroyed the works that he published himself, the folios in the Bentham papers represent works that were either never published by Bentham or were by editors, either in Bentham’s lifetime or since. There are another 12,500 folios by Bentham in the British Library. Bentham did not leave his corpus to UCL. In his will, he appointed John Bowring as his literary executor with instructions to produce an addition of his works. Bowring farmed out this work to a variety of editors, and between 1838 and 1843, an 11 volume edition of the works of Jeremy Bentham was published in Edinburgh. In 1849, one year before Bentham’s auto-icon arrived at UCL, Bowring deposited Bentham’s manuscripts in the college library. The Bowring edition is poorly edited and is far from complete. Bowring decided, for instance, to exclude Bentham’s writing on religion, feeling that they might offend too many potential readers. The Bentham papers were generally neglected until the 20th century, when it was decided that the Bowring edition was completely inadequate for the needs of modern scholarship and that a new edition of Bentham’s works should be prepared. It was only in the late 1950s that UCL established the Bentham Committee to oversee the publication of a new edition of Bentham’s works. Professor J. H. Burns was appointed the first general editor of the collected works of Jeremy Bentham in 1961. The present general editor, Professor Philip Schofield, is fourth. The Bentham Project is currently housed here, in the appropriately-named Bentham House in UCL’s Faculty of Laws. The project has published twenty-seven volumes of Bentham’s works and work has begun on a further dozen volumes. The collected works will eventually run into around seventy volumes. The edition is divided into two parts, we have the correspondence and the works. In the correspondence, we reproduce all known letters both to and from Bentham. In the works, we try and reproduce Bentham’s writings as closely as possible to Bentham’s intentions. And that means we’ve developed a hierarchy of sources, from the most authoritative to the least authoritative. So we consider the most authoritative to be those which Bentham published himself in his lifetime. After that we turn to Bentham’s manuscripts. There’s a lot of his writings which he never published, though he had an intention either that they should be published or they should be put into a readable form. And finally, where there was not work published by Bentham himself or the manuscripts don’t survive, there are works which were published by editors and disciples in the 19th century, and so if necessary we have to fall back to those editions. But the bulk of the edition is based on the material published by Bentham himself and also on the vast mass of manuscripts in the Bentham papers. The key to editing Bentham is trying to understand where he thought he was going with a work. At any stage during its composition Bentham would write multiple drafts of the same section, he would insert new sections, he would delete what he considered old material, he’d insert new material. In order to produce the texts you really have to understand what he thought he was doing with it. Once we think we know what's going into a text, we put everything in the Bentham template, which is a bespoke tool to assist editors and typesetters, for instance by distinguishing between Bentham’s footnotes, Bentham’s footnotes to his footnotes and editorial footnotes. Thereafter, we move on to annotation, we try to explain all Bentham’s allusions, either literary or historic, after that we write an editorial introduction which is emphatically not an attempt to provide a commentary on the substance of the volume, but rather an attempt to answer the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the volume. The last job we have is to compile comprehensive name and subject indices, and when that’s done, effectively you have a Bentham volume. The Bentham Project has recently launched a new initiative whose aim is partly to aid the project in its task of or producing the new edition of Bentham’s works. The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiatve, or Transcribe Bentham for short, is an exciting new collaborative venture with UCL’s new Centre for Digital Humanities. It is funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and its aim is to digitise Bentham’s paper, and to harness the power of crowd-sourcing to facilitate their transcription. Well I think the way that we got involved originally in Transcribe Bentham was that Professor Philip Schofield, who’s the head of the project came to talk to us and we were trying to think about some interesting ways in which the material could be developed. My colleague, Melissa Terras, who’s deputy-director of the centre then thought about perhaps we could use crowdsourcing, so I think that's the way that it came about but it's really great because it means it fits in particularly well with what we like to do, and it’s produced such a fascinating project, it’s so great that we've had such a lot of interest from both the digital humanities community and people who are working on Bentham himself. There are 40,000 of Bentham’s papers which have never been transcribed or studied. By engaging the general public in the transcription of these papers, the Bentham Project’s task of producing 70 volumes of Bentham’s works will become much easier. But the Transcribe Bentham initiative also has other aims. A photographer from UCL’s Learning and Media Services is currently photographing these Bentham papers. These images will eventually be stored in an online digital repository. A transcription tool has been developed with the assistance of the University of London Computer Centre, which allows users to login and access these images and transcribe their content. The transcription tool has been developed as an open source software, and it allows users from around the world to access Bentham’s manuscripts and therefore his thoughts at source. This will allow users to contribute to the labour involved in actually producing the Collected Works. To transcribe the manuscripts, the user is presented on one side of the page with the photograph of the manuscript and a text box on the other. This text box allows the user to then enter the text of the manuscript and encodes the material using a very user-friendly tool bar, and at the click of a button you can add tacks for paragraphing, marginalia, paragraphing and so on, as Bentham’s manuscripts are extremely complex and this reproduces it fairly faithfully. Students can access reading lists and resources, including a timeline, images and videos about Bentham. They can also select manuscripts of particular relevance to their course of study. Users can chat to their friends online and they can gain points for their own contributions, moving up the progress ladders as they improve. Participants will be the first to read and document ideas which could be potentially intellectually profound. Just for the launch of Transcribe Bentham, the Bentham project is bringing Bentham’s studies into the digital age, aiming to make Bentham’s works truly accessible to all. We’re ensuring that not only Bentham’s corpse, but also his corpus is preserved for future generations.