I’ve been quiet from a bloggy point of view over the last few months – but behind the scenes I’ve been working hard with UCLDH’s designer at large, Rudolf Ammann, on this shiny new blog space, all of my very own!  Design choices are documented over on the about page, and I’m particularly fond of the header image, which is a section of a handwritten manuscript written by Jeremy Bentham, held in UCL Library Special Collections (JB/035/320/001), which has been transcribed by volunteers as part of UCL’s Transcribe Bentham project. The text contains Bentham’s writing on the Constitutional Code – Quasi-jury [1823-26] and the image is used with permission. Transcribe Bentham is a partner in the EU funded tranScriptorium project, in which we have been using the quality controlled transcripts from Transcribe Bentham to help develop modern, holistic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. An output of tranScriptorium is Transkribus: software that enables users to transcribe documents with HTR support. So what we see in the image above is the computer recognising Jeremy Bentham’s handwriting. Cool, huh? And sums up the space I hang out in: between cultural heritage and computing science.

I’ll leave up all the blog posts over at my old blogger site (which I have intentionally not linked to from here) to avoid link-rot, but all content, including comments, is replicated here. I do declare the good ship melissaterras.org open! New bloggage coming here soon!