My good deed for the day
Anyone out there with plenty of net time, patience, a love of history and/or philosophy, and nothing much to do with it? There's a new crowdsourcing project at University College London to transcribe the papers of Jeremy Bentham: Transcribe Bentham.
Getting archives online isn't hard, though it costs money to take the images. The tough bit is making the content widely accessible, through indexing, metadata and, if possible, transcription. Otherwise it's just a whole lot of photos of bits of paper. Paid transcription is painfully, painfully slow. This is likely to come up more and more in my sector, but Bentham is one of the first such projects, and it could have a huge impact. It's also linked to research on crowdsourcing archive projects, so even if you can't get into the project you'll be providing useful data ('Subject X looked at the transcription deck for five minutes, typed 'i give up' and participated no further. Hmm, this may need some work.')...
Don't know Bentham? Bio is here. His major contribution to philosophy is Utilitarianism, the idea that the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only right and proper end of government’. Less snuggly in practice than you might think, but it has some resonance with the Bhutan measure of Gross national happiness. Which, in turn, makes me happy.
(Hence, if you're on DW, Harmony icon. Isn't she cute?)
ETA I've played with the site myself a bit now. They have manuscripts ranked in order of difficulty. 'Easy' isn't facile, but there are good chunks of text you can read straight off, so it's good if you're interested in the content. 'Medium' is quite tricky - not so much for history lovers as people who like puzzles. They haven't put up anything 'hard', probably for fear of scaring people off. If you know someone who does a lot of aimless Su Doku, this might be the site for them!
Getting archives online isn't hard, though it costs money to take the images. The tough bit is making the content widely accessible, through indexing, metadata and, if possible, transcription. Otherwise it's just a whole lot of photos of bits of paper. Paid transcription is painfully, painfully slow. This is likely to come up more and more in my sector, but Bentham is one of the first such projects, and it could have a huge impact. It's also linked to research on crowdsourcing archive projects, so even if you can't get into the project you'll be providing useful data ('Subject X looked at the transcription deck for five minutes, typed 'i give up' and participated no further. Hmm, this may need some work.')...
Don't know Bentham? Bio is here. His major contribution to philosophy is Utilitarianism, the idea that the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only right and proper end of government’. Less snuggly in practice than you might think, but it has some resonance with the Bhutan measure of Gross national happiness. Which, in turn, makes me happy.
(Hence, if you're on DW, Harmony icon. Isn't she cute?)
ETA I've played with the site myself a bit now. They have manuscripts ranked in order of difficulty. 'Easy' isn't facile, but there are good chunks of text you can read straight off, so it's good if you're interested in the content. 'Medium' is quite tricky - not so much for history lovers as people who like puzzles. They haven't put up anything 'hard', probably for fear of scaring people off. If you know someone who does a lot of aimless Su Doku, this might be the site for them!