+ Searching Jeremy Bentham’s manuscripts with Keyword Spotting

The Bentham Project has been experimenting with the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of Bentham’s manuscripts for the past five years, first as a partner in the tranScriptorium project and now as part of READ .

Read about their progress with HTR and our Transkribus platform in blog posts from June 2017 and  February 2018.

Keyword Spotting

The results have thus far been impressive, especially considering the immense difficulty of Bentham’s own handwriting.  But automated transcription is not yet at a point where it is sufficiently accurate to be used by Bentham Project researchers as a basis for scholarly editing.

However, the current state of the technology is strong enough for keyword searching!  And thanks to a collaboration with the PRHLT research center at the Universitat Politècnica de València (another partner in the READ project), there are some exciting new results to report.  It is now possible to search over 90,000 digital images of the central collections of Bentham’s manuscripts, which are held at Special Collections University College London and The British Library.

• Start searching!
• Searching guidelines
• Record your searches on the Bentham Project’s Google sheet

Appeal for volunteers!

A Google sheet has been prepared with some suggested search terms in 5 different spreadsheet tabs (Bentham’s neologisms, concepts, people, places and other).  The Bentham Project is appealing for people to record their searches online, using the suggested search terms and some new ones too.  Some of the results will be shared at the upcoming Transkribus User Conference in November.

Background

The PRHLT team have processed the Bentham papers with cutting-edge HTR and probabilistic word indexing technologies. This sophisticated form of searching is often called Keyword Spotting. It is more powerful than a conventional full-text search because it uses statistical models trained for text recognition to search through probability values assigned to character sequences (words), considering most possible readings of each word on a page.

The result is that this vast collection of Bentham’s papers can be efficiently searched, including those papers that have not yet been transcribed! The accuracy rates are impressive. The spots suggest around 84-94% accuracy (6-16% Character Error Rate) when compared with manual transcriptions of Bentham’s manuscripts. More precisely speaking, laboratory tests show that the word average search precision ranges from 79% to 94%. This means that, out of 100 average search results, only as few as 6 may fail to actually be the words searched for. The accuracy of spotted words depends on the difficulty of Bentham’s handwriting – although it is possible to find useful results in Bentham’s scrawl! There could be as many as 25 million words waiting to be found.

Use cases

This fantastic site will be invaluable to anyone interested in Bentham’s philosophy.  It will help Bentham Project researchers to find previously unknown references in pages that have not yet been transcribed.  It will allow researchers to quickly investigate Bentham’s concepts and correspondents.  It should also help volunteer transcribers in the Transcribe Bentham initiative to find interesting material to transcribe.

This interface is a prototype beta version.  In the future, there are plans to increase the power of this research tool by connecting it to other digital resources, allowing users to quickly search the manuscripts at the UCL library repository, the Bentham papers database and the Transcribe Bentham Tanscription Desk and linking these images to rich existing metadata.

Feedback on this new search functionality is welcomed at: transcribe.bentham@ucl.ac.uk

Similar Keyword Spotting technology (based on research by the CITlab team at the University of Rostock, another one of the READ project partners) is currently available to all users of the Transkribus platform.  Find out more about how to get started with Keyword Spotting.