Manuscript Transcription in Your Own Home

This evening at 5:00 P.M., the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is hosting an online workship titled “Making History thru Handwriting: An Introduction to Manuscript Transcription.”

Julie A. Fisher from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and Sara Powell from Harvard University will discuss transcribing handwritten documents, the importance of that task in making more historic sources available for study, and practical tips for transcribers.

They will also talk about opportunities for the public to join transcription projects taking place across the United States and in Europe. This is a trend made possible by digital imaging. Transcribers can work at archives or at home, and images can be expertly manipulated to make marks clearer. That work can also go on when we’re staying healthy at home. There’s even specialized software for managing such projects.

Among local projects, Harvard University has invited people to participate in transcribing the thousands of documents from eighteenth-century North America that it has digitized in recent years. Another large crowd-sourced project is Transcribe Bentham at University College London. And the Georgian Papers Project straddles the Atlantic. More ongoing projects are listed on the From the Page software website.

Julie A. Fisher, Ph.D., specializes in Early American and Native American history. She’s developed digital humanities projects over the past four years at the American Philosophical Society and as a consulting editor with the Native Northeast Portal (formerly the Yale Indian Papers Project) at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. In March 2019 she hosted the Omohundro Institute’s first Transcribathon.

Sara Powell is the assistant curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library, specializing in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts—so she’s familiar with older handwriting styles that baffle us even more than ours will baffle the students of the late twenty-first century.

This workshop is scheduled to run from 5:00 to 5:45 P.M. on Wednesday, 13 January. It is free. To register, one must be logged in to the Omohundro Institute.

Was Bentham on the Autism Spectrum?

Last year I relayed the news that British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s body was coming to America for a museum exhibit.

To be exact, Bentham’s clothed skeleton will be in display in New York at the Breuer branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His head was mummified poorly and is therefore not usually shown to the public. But it was on display this winter in London.

A Telegraph story told me some other news about the head:

…scientists have taken samples of Bentham’s DNA to test theories that he may have had Asperger’s or autism, both of which have a strong genetic component. . . .

he was notably eccentric, reclusive and difficult to get hold of. He called his walking stick Dapple, his teapot Dickey, and kept an elderly cat named The Reverend Sir John Langbourne.

In 2006, researchers Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran suggested his unique character was driven by Asperger’s syndrome, after studying biographies which described a young Bentham as ‘having few companions his own age’; and being ‘morbidly sensitive.’

Lucas and Sheeran’s study was “Asperger’s Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham” in the Journal of Bentham Studies; a P.D.F. file can be downloaded here.

There are some obstacles to a genetics test of that hypothesis. First, while autism has a heritable aspect, nobody has identified specific genes as switches or markers. Instead, at least sixty-five genes have been linked to the condition, so it would be at least complex and perhaps impossible to say Bentham had the combination of genes that gives rise to autism.

Second, so far it’s been hard to isolate Bentham D.N.A. from, well, other D.N.A. The Telegraph quotes the curator who looks after Bentham’s head that “99 per cent of the DNA taken has come from bacteria in his mouth.” But at least the geneticists haven’t announced that Bentham was in fact a bacterium.

(Click on the Telegraph link for photos of Bentham’s head today. It’s not pretty.)

Seeing Jeremy Bentham

Several years ago, I took my mother to visit London for the first time. A friend she stayed with and I chose most of the places we visited, but Mom definitely wanted to see something at University College London.

Using a tourist map, I got us to the campus, but I forgot to factor in how a university can cover a lot of real estate. We entered at one corner and walked a long way, trying to find the right spot. As I recall, the hallways looked a lot like a suburban American high school, and they twisted a lot.

Finally we found a welcome desk staffed by what in the U.S. of A. we’d call security guards. Since since this was a British university, I’m going to assume that officially those men were porters.

Mom approached the young man seated behind the desk and said, “We’re looking for Jeremy Bentham.”

In his British way, the man looked torn between wishing to help these North Americans, embarrassment at not knowing how, and deeper embarrassment at having to embarrass us by asking for more information, thus showing that what we had supplied was grossly inadequate. He fumbled in a college directory. “Bentham. Is he a student here?”

“Oh, no—he’s dead,” Mom explained.

This didn’t improve the color of the young porter.

At this moment an older porter standing in a corner, who had rather been enjoying the conversation so far, stepped forward and pointed us toward the South Cloisters. Where indeed we found Bentham, seated in a wooden cabinet in the hallway, posters that students had made by hand and laser printer taped on the nearby walls.

In his will Bentham (1748-1832) insisted that his corpse be preserved and displayed. He wanted to make a point about practicality and the value of surgical dissection, though the method seems quite impractical.

Bentham’s surgeon donated the corpse to the university. By now it’s just a skeleton in a straw-stuffed suit with a wax head. The photograph above shows Bentham’s mummified head on a platter between his body’s feet, but for decades the head was stowed away in a vault.

This fall, Bentham’s head was brought out for display in an exhibit (up through February) titled “What Does It Mean To Be Human?: Curating Heads at UCL.”

And in the spring, Bentham’s body will travel to New York as part of the “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now)” exhibit at the Breuer branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It will consider the evocation of the living, three-dimensional body through approximately 120 works from 14th-century Europe to present, joining artists like Donatello, El Greco, Auguste Rodin, and Louise Bourgeois with historical reliquaries, anatomical models, and wax effigies. Casts of bodies, automated figures involving blood and hair, and clothed sculptures will all examine how art attempts an approximation of life.

This won’t be the body’s first trip away from London; in 2002 it went to a similar museum in Germany. Mom would have been terribly disappointed if it hadn’t been there when we visited.

Crowd-sourcing Mr. Bentham and Mr. Madison

Yesterday I used the word “crowd-sourcing,” which seems to be a growing buzzword in digital humanities—especially when funding for traditional, in-house transcription projects is in jeopardy.

One example related to the eighteenth century is Transcribe Bentham, centered at the University College London. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the only utilitarian philosopher whose taxidermied body I’ve seen, left thousands of pages of handwritten drafts, notes, and other material. This digital initiative invited anyone to sign up and translate that material into digital texts. The “About Us” page introduces the process:

Access the Transcription Desk, where you can create a user account which will give you transcribing privileges. You can then select a manuscript to view and transcribe, save your work, and return to view your own contributions. You can interact with other users by creating a social profile and by sharing ideas in the discussion forum. There is a quickstart guide to using the tool and detailed guidelines on how to transcribe the manuscripts. You can contact us for general advice, help with a specific problem or for further information.

Currently there are over 1,600 registered transcribers. Given that the project says elsewhere that the collective has completed 3,300 manuscripts, that doesn’t suggest high productivity from every registrant. But of course the project just needs enough.

Here in North America, Montpelier recently announced ConText’s crowd-sourcing project to create an extensive commentary on James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. That site says:

The Notes of Debates in ConText addresses a real need in our constitutional scholarship. There is currently no systematic, accessible commentary on the Notes that explains the details and context of each decision made at the convention, while also describing the subsequent (and ongoing) debates over constitutional meaning that have stemmed from those decisions. With this site, we are providing the most up-to-date analysis of the Framers’ debates by some of the country’s leading academic voices.

This project too offers registered users a chance to add their own comments. Discussions about the meaning and current importance of the convention’s decisions could conceivably get heated.