Impact of Social Sciences – Making it Free, Making it Open: Crowdsourced transcription project leads to unexpected benefits to digital research.

"A few years ago I made a commitment to Open Access – in an attempt to reach a wider audience for my academic work, and to tell people about research as it was happening (not three of four years later once it was locked behind a paywalled journal). I’m really pleased to have something new to talk about once again, and this time I can share it with you before it even comes out in print. Allied to this are a few spin-offs from the project in question - Transcribe Bentham, which aims to make the work of the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) available via a 'double award-winning collaborative transcription initiative, which is digitising and making available digital images of Bentham’s unpublished manuscripts through a platform known as the ‘Transcription Desk‘. There, you can access the material and—just as importantly—transcribe the material, to help the work of UCL’s Bentham Project, and further improve access to, and searchability of, this enormously important collection of historical and philosophical material. [Link]' First, the article: a pre-publication version which will be published in April in a special issue of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, from Edinburgh University Press. In it, Tim Causer and myself talk about crowdsourcing transcriptions of Bentham’s writings, the impact of Transcribe Bentham on the work of the Bentham Project, and the use of volunteers to help us with tasks traditionally associated with lone academic researchers. We give particular examples of new Bentham material transcribed by volunteers dealing with the subjects of political economy, animal welfare, and convict transportation and the history of early New South Wales, which has further clarified and widened our understanding of certain aspects of Bentham’s thought. You can go and get it here ..."