This session draws on a digital genetic edition of a BBC TV adaptation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch produced by a team at De Montfort University. Through visual analysis of one rich scene, it will demonstrate how digital tools can offer new approaches to using screen adaptations in the classroom to engage pre-GCSE pupils with 19th Century classic texts. Click here to start exploring before the workshop
Participants will receive an outline lesson plan and activity sheets based on the scene analysed in the workshop to support approaches to 19thC literary texts through adaptation for Year 9 and above.
Justin Smith is Professor of Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University and a former secondary school teacher of English. He was Principal Investigator on the Arts and Humanities-funded project ‘Transforming Middlemarch’ (2022-3) in partnership with the University of Nottingham and the British Library. Dr Lucy Hobbs is an adaptations specialist and is a freelance Commissioning editor and project manager for educational publishers such as HarperCollins and Hodder. She was Research Fellow on ‘Transforming Middlemarch’ and chief architect of its digital encoding and editorial annotation.
‘Transforming Middlemarch’ (2022-23) is believed to be the first digital genetic edition of a screen adaptation. It employs XML (eXtensible Markup Language) encoding to link digital versions of George Eliot’s novel (1872), screenwriter Andrew Davies’ shooting script (1993) and the BBC’s post-production script (1994). By way of intertextual annotation, notes, extended commentaries and over 300 multi-media assets, the resource allows users to explore the process of adapting a literary classic for television. Now, the team is reverse-engineering this technology for the classroom, to show how screen adaptation can open new pathways to the source text.
