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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

We uploaded ONLY George Eliot’s texts (allowing no outside sources) to OpenAI’s Premium large language model to generate chapter-by-chapter summaries, character names, settings, and key quotations, which were verified by human editors. The results provide "ground truth" chapter content to help researchers  pinpoint scenes and characters for closer analysis and new application development.

Transforming Middlemarch

Transforming Middlemarch: A Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies' 1994 BBC Adaptation of George Eliot's Novel is an AHRC-funded digital humanities project created by Justin Smith, Gabriel Eagan, Anna Blackwell, Lucy Hobbs, Natalie Hayden and Beverley Rilett.

George Eliot's Reading

Underway. since 2019 and finally completed by graduate assistant Sarah Guyer in 2025, George Eliot’s Reading is an open-access library features 923 texts that George Eliot is documented to have read. This full-text collection provides a comprehensive resource for exploring the intellectual influences that shaped Eliot's work.

Audiobooks - Audible Editions of George Eliot's Fiction

From our own TEI-encoded files, we created interactive text-to-speech Audiobooks. These TTS audiobooks supplement our collection of human-read audiobooks provided by Librivox volunteers. See our GitHub repos for our open-source code.