George Eliot Text Explorer
SEARCH EVERY WORD GEORGE ELIOT PUBLISHED HERE:
- Choose a text (e.g., "Middlemarch" or "All Nonfiction") from the drop-down menu.
- Enter your keyword or phrase.
- Click the “Search” button to view results.
- Click any result to see the full-text context.
- To highlight names of places, characters, or direct speech, in a fiction work, see highlight bar in the lower right side of the text box.
- Click the “Voyant Tools” tab for a word cloud visualization, then click the question icon to explore different visualization options. (Note: Voyant's performance may vary based on your digital environment.)
Important: The George Eliot Text Explorer works best with Google Chrome; results may be incomplete in Safari.
The George Eliot Text Explorer is a concordance tool for analyzing George Eliot's works, developed by Libo Sun, Yue Cui, Beverley Rilett, and the George Eliot Archive team. This 2024 application replaces a prototype begun in spring 2023 for word-searching Eliot's works of fiction.
We improved search functionality by displaying three words on either side of the search term and added full-text context highlighting. For text visualization and analysis, we incorporated the brilliant application Voyant Tools (Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell) for text visualization.
By Fall 2024, we expanded Text Explorer to include Eliot's poetry and nonfiction. We grouped the nonfiction and poetry together to explore trends across those genres. If you would like access to the individual publications, please see our GitHub link, where we share George Eliot's entire corpus freely.
In 2024-25, we encoded the texts with a deeper level of TEI and by spring 2025, we added a feature to highlight direct speech and named entitites (people and places) in the fictional works. Further TEI encoding for Nonfiction and Poetry is in the pipeline for Fall 2025.
We are continually updating this application, which has become indispensible to thousands of individuals interested in George Eliot. Thank you all for using it!
We welcome your feedback! Please share your experiences with the George Eliot Archive by contacting Beverley Park Rilett at bdr0032@auburn.edu or BRilett2@Auburn.edu.