CIRCA:The Bentham Project
From CIRCA
The Bentham Project began at the University College of London in 1958 with the intent of publishing an exhaustive scholarly edition of philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s writings. Bentham was prolific; he authoured over 70 volumes on the topics of morality, religion, crime and punishment, law, economics, and other related subjects.
Bentham’s original manuscripts, about 72,500 folios total, are challenging to transcribe. His writing is hurried and sometimes incomprehensible, there are numerous scribbles, revisions, and crossed out words, and the folio paper itself is rather large. Almost 20,000 folios had been transcribed by hand between the year of the project’s inception (1958) and 2010.
It was obvious that a new method for the transcription of the manuscripts was required if the project was ever to be finished. This led to the introduction of the Transcribe Bentham Project in September 2010.
