George Eliot Archive

Kaylen Michaelis Author

07/31/2021 Added

6 Plays

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The George Eliot Archive is an online site that works to showcase any material pertaining to the author, George Eliot. This video covers current projects, focusing on digitizing correspondence especially those found in the Beinecke.

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[00:00:00.660]Hi everyone. My name's Kaylen Michaelis.
[00:00:02.430]I'm doing my presentation on the George Eliot archive, which is edited by Dr.
[00:00:07.050]Beverley Rilett.
[00:00:08.430]So a little bit about who George Eliot is and what the project does.
[00:00:13.710]So George Eliot was a British authoress and she is in fact,
[00:00:18.630]a woman,
[00:00:19.080]many people think that she is a man just by her name George Eliot.
[00:00:24.360]Uh, it's kind of interesting why she used her name.
[00:00:26.880]It was mostly because she basically,
[00:00:30.060]she got into a relationship with a married man.
[00:00:31.950]And what happened was he
[00:00:35.630]And his wife had like separated a few years before and divorce wasn't a thing in
[00:00:40.520]really a thing in that time.
[00:00:43.160]And so the guy that started your relationship with had essentially ended his
[00:00:47.780]relationship with his wife.
[00:00:48.860]And so George Eliot and him started basically what they viewed as a marriage,
[00:00:53.450]but technically wasn't viewed as marriage in like the law of the land. But,
[00:00:58.130]because of like kind of the scandal,
[00:00:59.600]they decided it would be better for her to use a pen name.
[00:01:01.610]And so that's why she used George Eliot,
[00:01:04.610]the project itself consists of three sites.
[00:01:07.940]The main one is the George Elliot archive.
[00:01:10.700]And basically what we do is find all materials pertaining to George Eliot and
[00:01:14.990]put it, put it on there. So if you look at the third bullet point,
[00:01:18.560]that has a lot of the projects that are on the George Elliott archive and then
[00:01:22.850]our other second site is the George Eliot review,
[00:01:26.750]which has put on just a lot of the George Eliot review
[00:01:31.610]magazine stuff.
[00:01:32.960]And then George Elliot scholars is where we have all of the like modern
[00:01:37.940]day writings about her work, which is pretty cool.
[00:01:42.620]And I guess one thing before we get started into what I do,
[00:01:45.560]it is like a team project that has been building up for many, many years.
[00:01:49.670]So this has gone through many different people before I even started working on
[00:01:54.350]it and it'll go through many different people after to me. Um,
[00:01:58.490]so it's really cool,
[00:02:02.420]Moving onto what I did this semester.
[00:02:03.650]So the archive is moving from the university of Nebraska.
[00:02:07.190]And so some of the stuff that I was doing this semester was preparing for that
[00:02:11.060]move, which entailed like a lot of different things, um,
[00:02:14.300]just to ensure that we didn't lose anything in the move. So for example,
[00:02:18.920]I uploaded all of our files onto an external drive,
[00:02:22.850]which was like massive. There are so many files, um,
[00:02:26.930]cause we'll also be losing box, which we used box to store a lot of stuff.
[00:02:30.890]And because of various factors that took took forever. Um,
[00:02:34.230]another thing I did was just putting spreadsheets onto Omeka,
[00:02:37.670]which is where we basically store like it's like the behind the scenes is of
[00:02:42.590]the archive site thing. And so we put it on there. Of course it's not public,
[00:02:46.310]but it's there so that we hopefully don't lose it and it's more organized.
[00:02:50.600]I still did that. And then I also just made sure that a lot of our,
[00:02:54.230]we use Trello to keep tabs on all of our different tasks and stuff.
[00:02:57.800]So I just kind of made sure that the next team has all the
[00:03:02.410]information that they need, um, for what we did,
[00:03:07.380]so they don't redo any work.
[00:03:09.390]And so they know exactly where they need to go from there.
[00:03:12.390]And then another cool thing that we,
[00:03:15.000]that I just recently did was I was putting UCARE videos on the GE scholar sites.
[00:03:19.650]So like I said,
[00:03:21.120]this has been an ongoing project with many different people working on it.
[00:03:25.230]And many people were in UCARE.
[00:03:26.970]So you have a lot of different videos that people have done.
[00:03:29.460]And so we're now putting that on the GE scholars website.
[00:03:32.460]It's not quite public yet, but we will have that up there. All right.
[00:03:37.290]The main project though,
[00:03:38.370]that we've been working on this summer is the Beinecke letters project.
[00:03:42.330]And pretty much our whole entire team this summer has been focused on this
[00:03:46.860]particular project.
[00:03:48.630]So the Beinecke has a ton of letters,
[00:03:53.280]correspondence of George Elliot writing to people,
[00:03:56.610]people writing to George Elliot or just people in connection with George Elliot
[00:04:00.960]writing to each other. Uh,
[00:04:03.260]and they have a huge collection of that and our editor, Dr. Beverly Rilett
[00:04:08.100]at one point took a whole bunch of photos, a lot of their collection.
[00:04:10.770]And so what we've been doing this summer is been editing those
[00:04:15.360]photos, cleaning them up and putting them into pdfs so that, um,
[00:04:19.260]collecting the metadata on it so that we can put it onto the archive, uh,
[00:04:23.490]for now it's just for our personal use,
[00:04:25.140]just because we didn't have permission quite yet to put it, um,
[00:04:28.530]for public use on the archive. But we're working on getting that,
[00:04:32.370]getting that permission. I can show you quickly,
[00:04:37.590]it looks like this is what, um,
[00:04:40.380]the photos would look like when we got them.
[00:04:44.820]And then when we edit it, so we just edit and put it all in one PDF.
[00:04:48.870]And so it'll look really clean. All the pages are the same size. Um,
[00:04:53.490]it's like the right rotation. And then we also split
[00:04:56.130]up those, those pages. So,
[00:04:59.160]It's a little bit easier to read. Um, so we did a whole lot of,
[00:05:02.430]a lot of that this summer. We also look for already written transcriptions.
[00:05:07.020]A lot of what we used was, um,
[00:05:11.040]done by Gordon S Haight, uh, because he's done a ton of transcriptions,
[00:05:15.660]um, for George, like George Elliot correspondence work.
[00:05:20.490]And that's just because the letters could be really hard to read cause the
[00:05:24.810]handwriting could be really messy.
[00:05:26.130]And so then people will be able to just be able to see the transcription and
[00:05:30.870]then also the letter.
[00:05:33.030]And I've also been doing some transcription work myself, um,
[00:05:37.020]cause not all of them have transcriptions already done.
[00:05:40.560]So I did a little bit of that and other people on the team have been doing that
[00:05:44.250]too. And we'll talk a little bit about it later. Uh, you,
[00:05:48.600]we have also been retrieving just the digitized letters from the Yale university
[00:05:52.860]library website. So we didn't Dr. Bev didn't get the photos of everything,
[00:05:56.460]but thankfully Yale university has digitized a lot of them.
[00:05:59.840]And so we went and grabbed those so that we can have those all set
[00:06:04.520]up. Um,
[00:06:05.630]hopefully when we get permission to show that on the archive,
[00:06:11.120]all right, then we'll talk a little bit about our transcription work. So
[00:06:16.190]what basically happens is we kind of work on it a little bit together.
[00:06:19.670]People will first go through by themselves and try to
[00:06:24.500]kind of read all of this and put it on a word document,
[00:06:29.210]you know,
[00:06:29.510]and then we'll meet up together and go over it to see if we can maybe fill in
[00:06:33.560]the blanks or catch any mistakes. This one isn't too bad.
[00:06:36.980]If we look on the left,
[00:06:37.790]here's an example of like a letter has fairly good handwriting.
[00:06:42.170]It can be a lot, lot worse. Um,
[00:06:44.570]this one's from Herbert Cross oh sorry from Herbert Spencer to John Cross.
[00:06:49.430]And John Cross was the second husband of George Eliot.
[00:06:54.980]And it's kind of an interesting thing because in this one, Herbert,
[00:06:57.950]Spencer is basically he's addressing like this rumor about him being in love
[00:07:02.420]with George Eliot.
[00:07:03.170]And he's saying that never was a thing when there was like a whole lot of
[00:07:06.140]history behind that I won't get into it. Um,
[00:07:08.390]but that's kind of why we're so interested in letters because there's a lot of,
[00:07:12.500]um,
[00:07:12.680]just like insight into George Elliot's personal life that we can get from them.
[00:07:16.940]Of course it's only scratching the surface, but um, you know
[00:07:20.750]we get some of it. So it's, it's pretty cool. And so then, um,
[00:07:25.130]also if we look at the bottom here, the, in Victorian letters,
[00:07:29.300]they also use like to use these abbreviation type things.
[00:07:32.210]So if you look at the little picture,
[00:07:35.300]there's the w and the H with the underlying, which is abbreviated for which,
[00:07:40.160]and they like to use those. And another example would be like would,
[00:07:43.310]which is just a w and then underline d.
[00:07:46.460]So it's kind of cool to see how people in Victorian times decided to write
[00:07:50.900]things and abbreviate things. That's pretty much it.
[00:07:55.370]Thanks everybody for listening to the video and thanks to UCARE for supporting
[00:07:59.660]the project and have a good one everyone.

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