Undergrad and Graduate Students Present Work at International Conference
Two English students from the University of Lethbridge shared their research with an international audience this week, delivering a lecture in French at a major academic conference in Montreal.
Jocelyn McKnight, an undergraduate in English, and Davide Pafumi, a PhD student in medieval English and Digital Humanities, presented their collaborative paper, "Works for me? Testing Screwmeneutics as an Approach to Old English Digital Philology." Their work examines the limits of computational approaches to Old English through a case study on Beowulf.
The paper explores the tensions between digital humanities methods—which often emphasize play, experimentation, and flexibility—and traditional philological rigour. McKnight and Pafumi demonstrated how current natural language processing tools for Old English frequently produce unreliable results, raising important questions about the standards and infrastructure needed for digital scholarship.
Speaking in French, the students highlighted both the challenges and opportunities that digital philology presents, advocating for stronger peer review of digital tools and greater transparency in their development.