George Eliot Archive - Commentary by Contemporaries

Kaylen Michaelis Author

04/01/2021 Added

19 Plays

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Over view of the George Eliot Archive project, especially focusing on the Commentary by Contemporaries Section, Newspaper Articles, and the beginning stages of George Eliot's Journals Project.

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[00:00:00.542]Hello,
[00:00:01.983]my name is Kaylen Michaelis and I'm an assistant editor on the George Elliot
[00:00:04.708]archive under the supervision of Dr. Beverly Rilett.
[00:00:08.447]The goals of the archive are to give access to materials written by and about
[00:00:11.838]George Elliot to people around the world. Basically,
[00:00:14.497]we are obsessed with anything about her. Currently,
[00:00:17.290]the archive has over 3000 files, which include books, book chapters,
[00:00:20.926]newspaper articles, illustrations,
[00:00:22.952]and more among our current and finished projects are George Elliot's published
[00:00:26.864]works commentary by contemporaries, which is a collection of books, book
[00:00:30.678]chapters, magazines, and newspaper articles written about her by people,
[00:00:33.583]the time period, the image gallery,
[00:00:36.015]a chronology of George Elliot and an interactive map,
[00:00:40.328]interactive maps of George Elliot's travels.
[00:00:43.397]There are also many future projects for the archive that the team is in various
[00:00:46.641]stages of finishing,
[00:00:47.975]such as the relationship web, George Elliot's library and George Elliot's
[00:00:51.735]journals. Additionally,
[00:00:53.011]we have two sisters sites called the George Elliot review and George Elliot
[00:00:56.019]scholars.
[00:00:56.912]My main focus on the George Elliot archive has been the commentary about
[00:01:00.908]contemporary collection.
[00:01:02.524]This part of the archive is continuously growing as there is always much more
[00:01:07.101]material to find. My work consists of finding these documents,
[00:01:09.915]collecting metadata on them, cleaning and prepping the file,
[00:01:12.536]and then adding it to the archive with all the necessary information.
[00:01:15.679]The metadata is extremely important because it helps us to keep a record of the
[00:01:19.408]document's characteristics.
[00:01:20.855]This is beneficial when researching a particular question and organizing the files,
[00:01:24.343]we simply have to go to the spreadsheet and find the info needed.
[00:01:27.206]The collection also needs quite a bit of maintenance as we are constantly
[00:01:31.056]finding better ways to present information and changes are also necessary while
[00:01:34.844]we are transitioning away from box.
[00:01:37.436]There are two main sections of commentary by contemporaries commentary on GE
[00:01:40.782]life and comment to your GE works,
[00:01:43.516]which is pretty pretty self explanatory. We also had quite a recent edition,
[00:01:48.169]we just added a whole bunch of newspaper articles to the archive,
[00:01:52.834]which started happening in summer of 2020.
[00:01:55.187]But we're continuing to expand on that,
[00:01:57.534]which kind of gives us a good insight on what the public was feeling towards
[00:02:01.384]George Eliot at the time. I'm just gonna show you really quick,
[00:02:05.747]a spreadsheet for commentary by contemporary section. So as you can see,
[00:02:09.622]it's pretty extensive. We have quite a few
[00:02:13.191]files and many sheets too.
[00:02:18.384]It's kind of separated into sections, so here's like books.
[00:02:21.193]and then there's also the newspapers sheet.
[00:02:25.257]And here we record all, all the metadata, all the necessary information, title,
[00:02:29.106]author, and all of that fun stuff.
[00:02:31.771]And then eventually all of this and it gets put onto Omeka,
[00:02:36.671]which is the admin site.
[00:02:39.458]So here's Omeka and we'll go to contemporary.
[00:02:44.966]So you're going to the section,
[00:02:47.890]and this is where the files and all of that metadata eventually get put on.
[00:02:52.889]put in,
[00:02:54.055]so here we go into one of the files and here we see all that information that
[00:02:58.765]was on a spreadsheet is listed here or also in the tags too.
[00:03:02.430]depending on like what topic it is and how kind of, you know,
[00:03:08.260]keywords to look for. Here we go.
[00:03:12.746]And I'll just show you really quick. the newspaper files is kind of
[00:03:17.155]a thing that I have been kind of specializing in,
[00:03:20.460]and I've found a great deal of interest in how the media responded to her during
[00:03:25.953]that time among the book reviews, summaries of her life,
[00:03:28.601]there also many gossip stories and comical antidote anecdotes,
[00:03:31.750]many writers have criticized George Elliot's relationship GH Lewis, which is,
[00:03:36.232]um, she kind of thought of him as her husband, but he wasn't really,
[00:03:41.478]they didn't, they weren't legally married.
[00:03:43.463]So it was kind of a scandal of the time.
[00:03:45.528]And there's also a surprising amount of articles critiquing George Elliot's
[00:03:49.018]appearance to the point of rudeness, um, among one of the weirder,
[00:03:52.980]articles that there are, there's this article about George Eliot
[00:03:57.841]Warwickshire sauce. So I'll pull up the file. So this is,
[00:04:02.244]a newspaper, that's what our newspaper file will look like,
[00:04:07.618]on here. And so we can scroll in.
[00:04:15.623]And so here is the article, a new Midland industry workshare sauce,
[00:04:20.560]and the first sentence reads,
[00:04:23.067]there are a few persons in the Midlands who have not become familiar with the
[00:04:27.285]appetizing preparation known as George, as the George Elliot Warwickshire sauce.
[00:04:31.546]I just find it hilarious that she literally has a sauce named after her.
[00:04:36.045]And it's, it's pretty cool this semester.
[00:04:40.415]I've also spent a great deal of time collecting data and preparing the beginning
[00:04:43.743]stages of George Elliot's journals project. For now,
[00:04:46.668]I have gathered journal entries on a spreadsheet along with important notes,
[00:04:49.435]such as page number and date.
[00:04:50.975]Eventually other members of the George Elliot team will use this data to place
[00:04:53.881]the journals into a more interactive format.
[00:04:56.280]The information cannot be displayed as a book due to copyright law,
[00:04:59.305]but the words themselves are in the public domain.
[00:05:02.020]And so we must transform it in some way, metadata spreadsheets. It, um,
[00:05:05.600]such as this often serve as the flesh and blood of products to fill in once the
[00:05:10.035]infrastructure is constructed, this is how most of our products start out.
[00:05:14.167]For example, the chronology and the interactive maps, um,
[00:05:17.423]started very similarly.
[00:05:19.164]Similarly to this there's the journal spreadsheet.
[00:05:23.067]It looks a little different than the commentary by contemporaries spreadsheet,
[00:05:26.977]but it serves a very similar purpose, um,
[00:05:29.674]but just has different information on it.
[00:05:32.828]And there's many different sections to this too. So it's very organized.
[00:05:36.226]And so this eventually will go into making,
[00:05:39.556]a much prettier project,
[00:05:44.486]a much nicer way to show the journals, but this is kind of the,
[00:05:48.948]the blueprint for it.
[00:05:52.111]So as I'm an assistant editor,
[00:05:54.278]I spend a lot of time doing miscellaneous jobs on our Trello board,
[00:05:57.978]which is kind of how we organize tasks.
[00:06:00.396]My job is to not only complete some of these cards that we're seeing here,
[00:06:04.037]but also to delegate them to other members of our team.
[00:06:09.041]This is important to make sure that things go smoothly and that work is being
[00:06:12.952]done efficiently.
[00:06:13.863]It also helps miscommunication on who is doing what I also spend a lot of time
[00:06:18.542]training assistants on Omeka, um, and Adobe Acrobat,
[00:06:22.221]which I showed you in Mecca briefly.
[00:06:24.745]Adobe Acrobat is also a little hard.
[00:06:29.123]Sometimes it can be difficult to learn,
[00:06:32.820]cause you have to learn how to OCR.
[00:06:35.024]This is Adobe Acrobat and how to edit PDFs.
[00:06:38.788]And sometimes you have to kind of wrestle with it because sometimes Adobe
[00:06:43.031]Acrobat doesn't like you telling it what to do.
[00:06:45.382]So I kind of helped train people on how to use it, uh,
[00:06:49.110]cause it's often difficult when first trying to navigate it,
[00:06:53.199]but it's also kind of our bread and butter. Uh, so that, that is,
[00:06:58.115]I also do that for the archive,
[00:07:00.143]but work that we do in the archive makes research materials pertaining to
[00:07:04.025]George Eliot accessible to scholars all over the world,
[00:07:06.279]through the information provided on the archive.
[00:07:08.443]People can gain a better sense of who George Elliot was and what society thought
[00:07:11.685]of her and therefore gain further understanding into her writings.
[00:07:14.472]It is important to know where someone came from and how life often affects
[00:07:18.539]people. The way that people write, um,
[00:07:21.702]the archive organizes this information.
[00:07:24.083]So it is easier for people to find additionally,
[00:07:26.263]sharing these materials with the world opens up the subject for scholarly
[00:07:28.662]voices from all over to read and then share their thoughts through our sister
[00:07:32.528]site, George Eliot scholars,
[00:07:34.330]their archive is about sharing George Elliot so that we can learn more about
[00:07:38.109]this great author through our viewers and more about the world.
[00:07:40.906]Through her.

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George Eliot Archive - Commentary by Contemporaries

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