George Eliot Archive

Brandon Unverferth Author

04/05/2021 Added

8 Plays

Description

Work as a member of the George Eliot Archive team. Offers an overview of the Archive and details several projects that I completed as a member of the team.

Searchable Transcript

Search:

[00:00:01.290]Hello, my name is Brandon Unverferth. And for my UCARE project,
[00:00:05.190]I worked as a member of the George Eliot archive undergraduate team.
[00:00:10.650]The archive has been around for several years at UNL and my work largely
[00:00:15.030]consisted of adding to existing projects or creating new resources to benefit
[00:00:19.710]the archive as a whole.
[00:00:21.690]The archive has numerous completed projects and I've listed some of the most
[00:00:25.680]important pieces here. The interactive maps are incredibly useful tools.
[00:00:30.840]One of which is shown in this slide, this particular map tracks,
[00:00:35.130]Georgia Eliot's trips to Italy and allows researchers to click on the various
[00:00:39.330]points to learn more information, our image galleries.
[00:00:43.380]So a wide variety of pictures of George Eliot,
[00:00:46.320]illustrations of her works and the characters and pictures of places that were
[00:00:50.550]important in her life.
[00:00:52.800]The interactive chronology of Eliot's life allows researchers to quickly and
[00:00:57.240]easily find specific points in her life that are organized in a series of
[00:01:01.530]expanding subsections based on chronological order.
[00:01:05.580]Each team member over the years long course of the project has been vital to
[00:01:09.780]expanding and developing the archive into what it is today.
[00:01:14.280]I worked with several other team members during the,
[00:01:16.650]during my time on the project,
[00:01:18.510]which made it feel like a true team as we helped one another and the project
[00:01:23.370]as a whole, we also have several projects in development.
[00:01:27.840]One of which is the relationship web,
[00:01:30.150]which will show portraits of Eliot's family, friends, and colleagues.
[00:01:34.350]George Eliot's portrait will be at the center and the other images will be
[00:01:38.190]organized around her with the ones closest to her on the screen,
[00:01:42.300]being those who were most important to her life.
[00:01:45.690]The commentaries by contemporaries is an ongoing project that researches what
[00:01:50.220]George Eliot's contemporary said and wrote about her,
[00:01:53.820]which is vital to any research on her work
[00:01:56.690]and life.
[00:01:59.660]For my work on the project, I started out by annotating several critical essays.
[00:02:04.340]A few of which are listed here.
[00:02:06.800]This was vital to my development as a member of the team,
[00:02:09.950]as it helped me get oriented on the project and learn more about George Eliot
[00:02:13.730]research, these annotations will also be useful to the archive.
[00:02:18.110]As future team members will be able to more easily identify useful articles for
[00:02:22.430]their projects.
[00:02:24.140]I hadn't read or researched George Eliot very much before joining the project.
[00:02:28.460]And these annotations helped fill that gap.
[00:02:30.650]In my knowledge while also providing me with important annotation skills that I
[00:02:35.300]will be able to use in future research.
[00:02:40.250]My main project as a member of the archive involved, a George Eliot dictionary,
[00:02:44.690]the characters and scenes of the novels stories and poems alphabetically
[00:02:48.590]arranged compiled by Isidore G. Mudge and M. E. Sears in
[00:02:52.730]1924.
[00:02:54.620]The book contains descriptions of all of Eliot's characters and places,
[00:02:59.080]and is itself a vital tool for research on the author's works.
[00:03:03.550]My task was to create a spreadsheet of over 2000 to entries listed in the book,
[00:03:08.920]which will then be developed into a searchable online resource by our web
[00:03:13.000]development team.
[00:03:14.710]This resource will be searchable by character place and to work,
[00:03:18.580]which will make finding pertinent information far easier than it would be.
[00:03:22.330]If you had to search through the physical dictionary.
[00:03:25.570]I also wrote a brief introduction to that in development section of the archive
[00:03:29.800]that details the goals of the searchable dictionary. While
[00:03:33.310]the dictionary itself is useful, searching
[00:03:36.970]it is tedious.
[00:03:39.490]Our resource will make it much easier for George Eliot scholars to do their
[00:03:43.180]research and will vastly improve the accessibility that Mudge and Sears were
[00:03:47.740]trying to achieve when they created the dictionary in the first place.
[00:03:54.390]My other big project was to continue developing a Twitter deck of Eliot's
[00:03:58.020]quotes from Alexander Main's book
[00:03:59.970]"Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of
[00:04:04.110]George Eliot."
[00:04:05.580]I added numerous sayings to a spreadsheet that had been started by a former team
[00:04:09.150]member, which will then be used to, to create a tweet deck for the archive.
[00:04:14.310]This tweet deck will be developed into automated daily tweets,
[00:04:17.430]which will both spread Eliott's quotes and bring more George Eliot scholars to
[00:04:20.970]the archive. Social media is an essential tool for anyone today,
[00:04:25.290]especially an entirely online project like the archive and this tweet deck will
[00:04:29.880]help improve the archive social media presence.
[00:04:35.370]I'd like to thank all the former and current members of the George Eliot
[00:04:38.560]archive for the brilliant work they've done to make the archive what it is.
[00:04:43.050]I give special thanks to Dr.
[00:04:44.400]Beverley Rilett for giving me this wonderful opportunity.
[00:04:47.790]The archive literally would not exist without her creative vision,
[00:04:51.390]commitment and perseverance,
[00:04:53.550]and her ability to lead this team has created a vital tool for any George
[00:04:58.410]Eliot research. Thanks for watching!

The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!

You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.

Comments

0 Comments

George Eliot Archive

Description

Searchable Transcript

Comments icon comment

Related Channels

Comments