https:/.../media.mp4

Hello, my name is Brandon
Unverferth. And for my UCARE project,

I worked as a member of the George
Eliot archive undergraduate team.

The archive has been around for several
years at UNL and my work largely

consisted of adding to existing projects
or creating new resources to benefit

the archive as a whole.

The archive has numerous completed
projects and I've listed some of the most

important pieces here. The interactive
maps are incredibly useful tools.

One of which is shown in this
slide, this particular map tracks,

Georgia Eliot's trips to Italy and
allows researchers to click on the various

points to learn more
information, our image galleries.

So a wide variety of
pictures of George Eliot,

illustrations of her works
and the characters and
pictures of places that were

important in her life.

The interactive chronology of Eliot's
life allows researchers to quickly and

easily find specific points in her
life that are organized in a series of

expanding subsections based
on chronological order.

Each team member over the years long
course of the project has been vital to

expanding and developing the
archive into what it is today.

I worked with several other
team members during the,

during my time on the project,

which made it feel like a true team as
we helped one another and the project

as a whole, we also have
several projects in development.

One of which is the relationship web,

which will show portraits of Eliot's
family, friends, and colleagues.

George Eliot's portrait will be at
the center and the other images will be

organized around her with the
ones closest to her on the screen,

being those who were most
important to her life.

The commentaries by contemporaries is
an ongoing project that researches what

George Eliot's contemporary
said and wrote about her,

which is vital to any
research on her work

and life.

For my work on the project, I started out
by annotating several critical essays.

A few of which are listed here.

This was vital to my development
as a member of the team,

as it helped me get oriented on the
project and learn more about George Eliot

research, these annotations will
also be useful to the archive.

As future team members will be able to
more easily identify useful articles for

their projects.

I hadn't read or researched George Eliot
very much before joining the project.

And these annotations
helped fill that gap.

In my knowledge while also providing me
with important annotation skills that I

will be able to use in future research.

My main project as a member of the archive
involved, a George Eliot dictionary,

the characters and scenes of the
novels stories and poems alphabetically

arranged compiled by Isidore
G. Mudge and M. E. Sears in

1924.

The book contains descriptions of all
of Eliot's characters and places,

and is itself a vital tool for
research on the author's works.

My task was to create a spreadsheet of
over 2000 to entries listed in the book,

which will then be developed into a
searchable online resource by our web

development team.

This resource will be searchable
by character place and to work,

which will make finding pertinent
information far easier than it would be.

If you had to search through
the physical dictionary.

I also wrote a brief introduction to that
in development section of the archive

that details the goals of the
searchable dictionary. While

the dictionary itself is useful, searching

it is tedious.

Our resource will make it much easier
for George Eliot scholars to do their

research and will vastly improve the
accessibility that Mudge and Sears were

trying to achieve when they created
the dictionary in the first place.

My other big project was to continue
developing a Twitter deck of Eliot's

quotes from Alexander Main's book

"Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose
and Verse Selected from the Works of

George Eliot."

I added numerous sayings to a spreadsheet
that had been started by a former team

member, which will then be used to, to
create a tweet deck for the archive.

This tweet deck will be developed
into automated daily tweets,

which will both spread Eliott's quotes
and bring more George Eliot scholars to

the archive. Social media is an
essential tool for anyone today,

especially an entirely online project
like the archive and this tweet deck will

help improve the archive
social media presence.

I'd like to thank all the former and
current members of the George Eliot

archive for the brilliant work they've
done to make the archive what it is.

I give special thanks to Dr.

Beverley Rilett for giving me
this wonderful opportunity.

The archive literally would not
exist without her creative vision,

commitment and perseverance,

and her ability to lead this team has
created a vital tool for any George

Eliot research. Thanks for watching!