Bentham’s corpse and corpus preserved at UCL

At UCL, a project is run to transcribe the lots of J. Bentham’s unedited papers.

The originality is that they will use “crowd sourcing” for this task: a collaborative project to digitize his papers, with the help of volunteers drawn from the web. Gratuitous, hype project? Not quite, since these are 40,000 papers of Bentham that have never been transcribed or studied, and a massive distributed effort seems a clever use of the technology to speed up the completion of the transcription.

Jump at 5’15 for the description of the crowd-sourcing project.

What do the Bentham’s specialists think about this initiative? Do they expect it to change the scholarship on Bentham in any significant manner?

[thx to @your2pence who posted on this on http://your2pence.wordpress.com]