Bentham Hackathon

‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work‘

Jeremy Bentham, 1793

UCL have teamed up with IBM to hack the writings of the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Bentham wrote on a vast array of subjects including democratic reform, religion, crime and economics and his ideas on education inspired the founders of UCL.

Transcribe Bentham, part of the Bentham Project at UCL, is a digital humanities crowdsourcing initiative which asks members of the public to transcribe material written by Bentham.  Transcripts produced by volunteers are made freely available online and are used by the Bentham Project in the production of the definitive edition of Bentham’s Collected Works.

Digital humanities projects like this bring new tools to the study of the humanities, making new kinds of research possible and contributing to an enhanced understanding of our cultural heritage.

Transcribe Bentham is working with IBM to explore the following question at the Bentham Hackathon:

How can digital technologies help us to research Bentham’s philosophy?

Join us for an intense and fun weekend of hacking and problem solving as we apply the best of IBM’s innovative technology to a vast and unparalleled dataset of Bentham’s manuscripts.