The George Eliot Archive: Behind the Scenes

Thara Michaelis Author

04/05/2021 Added

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Extensive and diverse work goes into digital humanities projects. This presentation takes a walk through a multitude of current activities at the George Eliot Archive.

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[00:00:00.000]Hello all. My name is Thara Michaelis, and this is my presentation, The George Eliot Archive:
[00:00:04.768]Behind the Scenes. First, I want to preview why I work at the George Eliot Archive and
[00:00:10.155]why I think it matters. In 2010, Google estimated there were a little under 130
[00:00:15.935]million unique books existing in the world. And out of all the authors who wrote these books,
[00:00:20.144]George Eliot has been singled out by today's readers as well as her original audience in
[00:00:25.024]the Victorian era. People are still interested in the stories, the style, and the knowledge folded
[00:00:30.014]into the works of George Eliot and her life story. It's fascinating to analyze the bond
[00:00:34.648]between a writer and their work, to get to know the person behind the masterpiece and understand
[00:00:38.480]why the pieces were written and what they did for people, which is why I enjoy working at
[00:00:43.136]the George Eliot Archives so much and why people visit and contribute to our site. My work in the
[00:00:48.477]George Eliot Archive helps make George Eliot and her ideas and impacts more accessible.
[00:00:53.176]A little bit about George Eliot. I think this silhouette of George Eliot is very telling because
[00:01:00.750]when she first published Scenes of Clerical Life; she was under the pseudonym George Eliot,
[00:01:06.332]which she used for all of her later novels and works. But at that time nobody knew who George
[00:01:14.292]Eliot actually was. Her name was Mary Ann Evans, but nobody knew anything about the author. It was
[00:01:22.963]very intriguing. There was actually a guy who was hosted by many different people because
[00:01:30.420]they thought he was George Eliot. So he was living the high life pretending to be somebody he wasn't.
[00:01:35.983]A few had their guesses. Charles Dickens actually wrote to the publisher of the Scenes
[00:01:42.243]of Clerical Life asking this note to be passed on to George Eliot saying, hey, thank you. This work
[00:01:49.588]is really pretty wonderful and I would just like to say, or something along these lines, he said,
[00:01:55.904]I would be very much surprised if this work was written by a man because it seems like something
[00:02:04.762]a woman would write. And he was absolutely correct. George Eliot was a woman. And these are
[00:02:10.793]a bunch of examples of her works. Her most famous, Middlemarch, Romola, her attempt at poetry,
[00:02:17.305]most people prefer her prose, and then her last work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. At the
[00:02:22.575]archive we have 1,000 unique visitors per month, so people are interested in George Eliot. We also
[00:02:28.613]have 2 sister sites: the George Eliot Review Online and George Eliot Scholars. And George
[00:02:32.313]Eliot Scholars is really neat because people in the present day can put in their perspectives,
[00:02:40.057]their inspirations from George Eliot, and make it public for people to also look at. So,
[00:02:45.205]for us, George Eliot isn't only in the past, in archiving what people thought in, you know,
[00:02:51.259]the 1800's or the 1900's, it's also an ongoing, current discussion. A little bit about me. My name
[00:02:58.909]is Thara Michaelis and I am a research assistant. I am a sort of curator for the commentary by
[00:03:04.831]contemporary section. I have also organized data for the George Eliot Journals project,
[00:03:09.651]investigated research questions for our director, Dr. Beverly Rilett, and I have recently been
[00:03:15.808]writing and coding Wikipedia pages, which is very, very interesting since I've never coded before.
[00:03:21.283]Sometimes what I need to upload to our archive hasn't been digitized, so I scan them.
[00:03:26.428]I have used the scanners on the UNL campus printers, but I have found that an app (which I
[00:03:33.968]used to take this picture here, as you can see it kind of clears up the text so it's easier to read)
[00:03:38.638]is better for the binding health because sometimes I have to scan books where the binding is loose
[00:03:44.976]and pretty damaged so I gotta be careful, and using the scanners that are with the printers,
[00:03:49.751]it makes that a little bit difficult. So if I need to digitize something, I use this to make,
[00:03:55.617]to take pictures, and make a pdf. And once I get a PDF, I upload it to our admin site, Omeka.
[00:04:04.211]This is Omeka. So once I have the document, I come here and upload it as a PDF and I fill out
[00:04:10.664]the metadata. So the title, description (for articles I simply skim the passage and write
[00:04:18.556]a one sentence gist so visitors can know what they're about to read), the creator
[00:04:24.982](if there isn't one, I say "unknown"), the source, publisher (which is us), the date, rights,
[00:04:31.644]and then if it's a newspaper article or a book type. Then I also tag them with specific
[00:04:39.072]phrases or a person just so if you're researching something, you can type that phrase in and all the
[00:04:45.952]articles that have something to do with that will show up because they have been tagged with that
[00:04:50.337]phrase. So another project I worked on was the George Eliot Journals, where she kind of just
[00:04:56.639]penned down, and she wasn't religious about writing down, but it's kind of interesting to
[00:05:03.026]see what she wrote in her journals. So what I did (it was already in digital form) is I took this
[00:05:08.508]and since it was copyrighted (the book was copyrighted but the words couldn't be copyrighted
[00:05:14.908]because it was George Eliot, her journal) we just needed to turn it into a different format. So I
[00:05:20.147]took this, I put it into an Excel file and eventually it will become like this.
[00:05:26.499]The George Eliot Journals will turn into something like our George Eliot Chronology, where you can
[00:05:31.239]press on the dates and eventually it will come up with a sentence about or it will come up with a
[00:05:39.124]date that you can choose from and you can see what she had written on that date, so very interactive
[00:05:44.627]and very useful for our researchers. Here is an example of the investigative research I have done
[00:05:51.237]at the George Eliot Archive. I'm not going to go too far into it because Dr. Beverly still has to
[00:05:55.937]present it to the George Eliot Scholars world but in essence Dr. Bev shot me an email and
[00:06:02.092]said, hey, could you take a look at this portrait and the guy who is credited to it. It's a little
[00:06:08.585]funny. So I did. Originally, I looked him up in archives and just on the Google search engine,
[00:06:16.039]and I didn't find anything. But he lived in Berlin for a while so I decided to check out
[00:06:20.452]some German websites and, voila! Here's something that I found on those websites,
[00:06:26.153]and it gave us some insights into the process Sophus Williams had in making those portraits.
[00:06:31.294]If you look here, there are a lot of coincidences between these two photos.
[00:06:37.364]This photo by John Mayall and then the portrait credited to Sophus Williams, and there's a reason
[00:06:45.181]for that. And that is the finding that Dr. Bev is going to be presenting soon. Finally, this is the
[00:06:50.965]project that I've been working on most recently. It's pretty huge. I have been writing Wikipedia
[00:06:56.004]pages. It was very fun. I had never coded before, so it was a great learning experience. Originally
[00:07:04.062]this was just kind of a minor task. We were linking Wikipedia pages to our site
[00:07:11.220]in the external links, just offering a free PDF of whatever text the page was about. But I noticed
[00:07:18.260]that some of the texts we were supposed to be linking didn't have Wikipedia pages or had scant
[00:07:23.365]information, so I asked Dr. Beverly Rilett if I could write my own Wikipedia page or add to the
[00:07:29.332]Wikipedia page that was already existing. So this is the first one that I have done, Impressions of
[00:07:35.075]Theophrastus Such. I wrote most of the intro. I put together the plot/chapters, the character
[00:07:41.616]section, and I also wrote contemporary response. If you'll take a look, this is the coding.
[00:07:47.903]I mostly figured out how to code by using
[00:07:52.697]the Wikipedia page over Middlemarch as a template, and then if I couldn't figure something out,
[00:07:58.967]I just used Wikipedia. Thank you all for listening to my video. I would also like to thank my team
[00:08:05.681]and my very encouraging director, Dr. Beverly Rilett. If you have any questions, feel free
[00:08:11.922]to contact me with my email, and please check out our website. It is really cool.
[00:08:18.664]Thank you.

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