Present, not voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon: closing plenary speech, Digital Humanities 2010

The field of Digital Humanities continues to change and evolve rapidly, as we utilise, appropriate, and develop internet, communication, and computational technologies. In this plenary, a specific focus will be placed on one individual project – The Transcribe Bentham project at UCL k/transcribe-bentham/) – as a viewpoint through which to witness the changing demands and needs placed on those working within the Digital Humanities. Transcribe Bentham is a one year, Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, housed under the auspices of the Bentham Project at UCL Project aims to produce new editions of the scholarship of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Bentham was a political radical. An English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer, he became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and influenced the development of welfarism. He is well known for his advocacy of utilitarianism and animal rights, but is perhaps most famous for his work on the " panopticon " : a type of prison in which wardens can observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. This concept has influenced prison reform, philosophy, literature, and social media since. Bentham and UCL have a close relationship. Whilst it is untrue that he founded UCL, he did influence those who did, and as the first English University to open its doors to all, regardless of race, creed or political belief (provided they could afford the fees) UCL went a long way to fulfilling Bentham's vision of how Universities should operate. He took a great interest in the new institution, and UCL now hosts Bentham's 60,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts arranged in 174 boxes. His " auto-icon " famously sits in the main cloisters: Bentham's preserved skeleton, dressed in his own clothes, surmounted by a wax head, as per his will and testament. An apocryphal story has it that Bentham's " auto-icon " is wheeled yearly into UCL Senate meetings, where he is noted in the minutes as being " present, not voting ". Twelve volumes of Bentham's correspondence have so far been published by the Bentham Project, plus various collections of his work on jurisprudence and legal matters tham-Project/Publications/index.htm). However, there is much more work to be done to make his writings more accessible, and to provide transcripts of the materials therein. Although a previous grant from the AHRC in 2003-6 has allowed for the …