This past Saturday I presented a paper titled “Commentary, Annotation and the Virtual Humanities Lab” at the annual NEMLA conference, conveniently held in Cambridge, MA this year. I was an odd fit into the panel on adaptation, but it seems to have worked out beautifully.

Sadly, Kim Honeyford didn’t make it to the convention because of illness. This left three presenters. Being held as it was at 8:30am on a Saturday, we weren’t really expecting much in the way of an audience. We got two people, which was… intimate, but actually rather lively.

Michael V. DiMassa, a librarian from Yale, talked about adaptations of Ivanhoe, particularly the 1952 film, which took something like a decade and a half to make and in the end was a surprising mix of faithfulness to period detail and complete disregard for some important plot points.

Mark Rowell Wallin, who organized the session, talked about adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. He discussed at length the broken-telephone chain of the 1995 BBC series (starring Colin Firth, and very much worth watching in your humble narrator’s opinion) and then Bridget Jones’ Diary, which is an adaptation not of Austen’s novel but of the BBC series.

And I presented the VHL. The audience was not very familiar with humanities computing, so the paper was mostly a basic introduction to semantic encoding and its possible function as a scholarly argument. A significant portion of the talk is about collaboration, but this part is a bit superficial and I plan to expand that topic much further, so any comments and criticisms and pointers to literature are most welcome. Naturally, I was inclined to talk about adaptation, which I address in the end of the paper. If you’d like to read it, you can find it here (PDF, 108K). The handout I gave to people is here (PowerPoint file, 999K).