George Eliot Archive

Max Robeson Author

03/31/2021 Added

5 Plays

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An explanation of my work on The George Eliot Archive during the spring of 2021.

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[00:00:00.700]Hello, my name is Max Robeson
[00:00:02.530]and today I'll be talking about
[00:00:04.150]my work on the George Eliot Archive.
[00:00:06.570]I started working on the project last summer,
[00:00:08.940]as part of an independent study
[00:00:10.800]and I was happy to return back
[00:00:12.310]and lend some of the experience I gathered in the summer
[00:00:15.070]towards my internship this year.
[00:00:18.650]To start off, I just thought it'd be helpful
[00:00:20.580]to go over the team a little bit
[00:00:22.970]and some of the details of what we do.
[00:00:25.080]There are currently 13 members working on the website.
[00:00:28.460]We all work cooperatively
[00:00:29.990]in some of the main parts of the website,
[00:00:33.050]which include digitized image collections
[00:00:35.210]of the various portraits of George Eliot
[00:00:38.670]throughout her life, as well as illustrations
[00:00:40.600]surrounding her work.
[00:00:42.010]A commentary by contemporaries section,
[00:00:43.980]which delves into some of the contemporary
[00:00:48.600]articles about George Eliot's personal life,
[00:00:51.780]as well as reviews over her work.
[00:00:55.010]And then finally,
[00:00:56.140]we are working on different biographical resources.
[00:00:59.780]And some of them are already published,
[00:01:01.040]like the interactive maps of her travels
[00:01:04.620]and interactive life chronology,
[00:01:06.190]which is very helpful to see in a biographical sense,
[00:01:09.280]a month-to-month layout of her life.
[00:01:11.440]And finally, we're working on getting
[00:01:13.270]a social network published or relationship web.
[00:01:17.310]And that social network or relationship web
[00:01:19.690]has been something that I'm working on since the summer.
[00:01:22.360]Currently there are about 112 members
[00:01:24.900]listed as either business associates,
[00:01:26.630]friends or family to George Elliott.
[00:01:29.080]And my work this spring entailed
[00:01:31.440]getting some of that information that was found
[00:01:35.130]on Excel spreadsheets and uploading it to our program,
[00:01:38.280]Omeka, which is part of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
[00:01:42.180]And with Omeka, we have had to upload metadata
[00:01:45.870]in terms of source information
[00:01:47.740]with the various portraits
[00:01:49.680]or summaries of George Elliot's relations.
[00:01:55.870]From those summaries, it was kind of an interactive
[00:01:59.060]and cooperative affair, as there would be
[00:02:02.940]a Box folder on our shared Box
[00:02:05.490]that Dr. Bev would use to make revisions and comments.
[00:02:10.620]Where I would return back,
[00:02:12.390]either find a new clear portrait image
[00:02:15.100]or revise some of the summaries
[00:02:17.780]and then upload those to Omeka,
[00:02:19.840]which is pictured just right below my thumbnail here.
[00:02:23.130]I thought that I would include just a few of George Eliot's
[00:02:26.870]relations that would be found on the relationship web.
[00:02:29.860]in Charles Dickens, Jane Welsh Carlyle,
[00:02:32.080]John Stuart Mill and Florence Nightingale.
[00:02:34.690]She interacts with all of these
[00:02:37.280]in different capacities.
[00:02:38.730]Jane Welsh Carlyle, she knew
[00:02:40.610]a lot more than say, Charles Dickens.
[00:02:43.230]But they all exemplify George Eliot's sort of Victorian
[00:02:46.580]atmosphere when she was writing.
[00:02:48.720]Moving on, my next project was transcribing
[00:02:51.030]the National Library of Scotland Letters
[00:02:53.420]which was a project that I started last summer
[00:02:55.370]but didn't work extensively on.
[00:02:57.430]But meeting via Zoom with my with my other team members
[00:03:00.040]was an immense help as it kind of gave us a platform
[00:03:03.660]to address our questions and just air
[00:03:06.030]our different concerns about starting the project.
[00:03:09.510]And secondly, the experience I gathered
[00:03:13.200]through working with the program Omeka
[00:03:15.150]and the relationship web, lent itself perfectly
[00:03:17.610]to the letter transcriptions
[00:03:18.860]because I already was accustomed to which fields meant what
[00:03:23.400]and how to attribute licensing to the archive.
[00:03:26.870]And just going through the website,
[00:03:29.140]the program altogether was very important.
[00:03:33.040]The process in which the letters
[00:03:34.410]were transcribed was pretty simple.
[00:03:37.370]It entailed going to Box, which was a shared folder
[00:03:40.600]of consecutive letters being taken from Dr. Bev's trip
[00:03:44.270]to the National Library of Scotland.
[00:03:46.240]Which an example would be shown on the left here.
[00:03:49.290]And my job was just to identify the duplicates
[00:03:51.870]because Dr. Bev took multiple photos just to ensure
[00:03:54.620]that there was a clear image for each letter.
[00:03:58.870]And I would go to each letter, identify the duplicates
[00:04:01.750]and then find the info
[00:04:03.520]where I could rename the letter files
[00:04:06.080]to help in terms of organization.
[00:04:09.290]And then from that information,
[00:04:11.610]I would go then to the Omeka program
[00:04:14.600]and fill out the fields and upload the letter
[00:04:17.720]in PDF form, as shown on the left here.
[00:04:21.670]Lastly, I would also condense the information of the letters
[00:04:24.030]into a brief synopsis that would highlight
[00:04:26.010]some of the most important features of the letter.
[00:04:28.840]The last part of the letter transcript process
[00:04:31.150]was backing up some of that information that I'd upload
[00:04:34.270]to the Omeka program, onto a separate Excel file.
[00:04:37.470]Just for backup purposes and then to organize later on.
[00:04:43.020]And then as we see here,
[00:04:44.670]that third cell with the Box file name
[00:04:49.525]would be what I would see initially.
[00:04:51.210]And then the renamed file, which is on the far left there
[00:04:54.150]in the first cell,
[00:04:56.680]is what I would use to try
[00:04:57.860]to organize easier within Box itself.
[00:05:01.100]And then lastly, we had to record
[00:05:03.020]the National Library of Scotland
[00:05:05.490]record reference and the manuscript collection,
[00:05:08.020]with that MS 4734,
[00:05:11.683]and then finally just denoting
[00:05:12.670]who the letter was to and from.
[00:05:15.260]And I just wanna go over how important
[00:05:17.670]collaborating of the letters were.
[00:05:19.320]In terms of meeting via Zoom, made it so there was
[00:05:22.570]a uniformity across all of our letters
[00:05:24.810]no matter what the collection was from
[00:05:26.870]where for example, mine was from
[00:05:29.080]The National Library of Scotland
[00:05:30.300]but others had theirs from the New York Public Library
[00:05:33.400]or the Girton College from Cambridge, just for examples.
[00:05:36.620]And secondly, just looking for that information
[00:05:40.040]and new, exciting information reinforced the fact
[00:05:42.810]that our work on the project is interrelated.
[00:05:45.340]And lastly, distilling the context
[00:05:48.470]of the letters into a synopsis
[00:05:50.440]furthered my experience in condensing information
[00:05:53.330]and just highlighting the most important parts.
[00:05:56.310]So finally, this is a summary of what I've advanced
[00:05:59.150]through working in the George Eliot Archive.
[00:06:01.590]Is a highly collaborative team environment
[00:06:03.490]will lead itself to very unique and exciting projects.
[00:06:08.370]And just an overall, it furthered my biographical knowledge
[00:06:12.590]of Victorian political literary
[00:06:15.191]and artistic figures like George Eliot herself.
[00:06:18.900]And lastly, just knowing that a team environment
[00:06:22.880]where we can interact
[00:06:24.420]and ask each other questions
[00:06:26.551]leads to an enthusiasm about our work,
[00:06:28.212]that is invaluable.
[00:06:32.223]Thank you so much for watching.
[00:06:33.793]And if any of the components of the Georgia Eliot Archive
[00:06:36.791]interest you, then you can see our website
[00:06:39.113]at www.georgeeliotarchive.org.
[00:06:41.010]Thank you.

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