George Eliot Interactive Data
In this section, we provide several unique, interactive, "born-digital" models that enable researchers to explore previously unexplored facets of George Eliot’s life and works. These tools include:
Detailed Chronology of George Eliot’s Life
A highly detailed chronology visualized in two models: a branch model optimized for searching by date and a word-searchable calendar model. This tool includes more than 3,000 days of summaries and quotations from Eliot’s journals and letters, offering accurate biographical information and context for her writings.
Interactive Historical Maps
Explore Eliot’s travels through a set of interactive maps, including her first trip abroad in 1849 with the Brays, four trips to Italy with Lewes, and her honeymoon trip to Italy with Cross. In 2022, we added George Eliot's England, detailing places in her home country significant to her life and works. Most recently, in December 2024, we added an interactive map of Eliot's 1854 “honeymoon” trip to Germany with Lewes, complete with illustrations and a video map.
George Eliot’s Social Network
This tool visually represents Eliot's connections to family, friends, and business associates. It includes brief relationship summaries, portraits, and an index of relevant letters from the nine volumes of correspondence edited by G. S. Haight.
Dictionary of George Eliot's People and Places
A database application that allows users to quickly identify named places and characters in Eliot's works, providing a valuable reference for researchers.
George Eliot Text Explorer
Launched in 2024 after three years of development, this concordance tool allows users to search for any word or phrase in Eliot’s fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The Text Explorer provides each use in context and instantly retrieves related quotations. The tool required converting all published writings from PDFs to machine-readable TEI-encoded XML text, a process involving hundreds of hours of editing.
Chapter Summaries by AI
In Fall 2023, we input ONLY George Eliot’s texts into OpenAI’s Premium large language model to generate chapter-by-chapter summaries, character names, settings, and key quotations. The results are fascinating—some predictable, others surprising—and help researchers pinpoint scenes for closer analysis.
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