Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales are affectively prominent across various modes of literary and cultural adaptation. Tales like Hans Christian Andersen's "Snedronningen" (1844) – "The Snow Queen" – and "Den Lille Havfrue" (1837) – "The Little Mermaid", owe their current canonicity to the sheer volume of translations that have appeared since the introduction of Andersen's tales to English readers in 1846 and to French readers in 1878. This project engages closely and distantly with kisses as textual details, present throughout a transnational and multimedia history of translation and adaptation, and which resonate in complex and fascinating ways in the project of re-translation undertaken by Tiina Nunnally (2004) and Marc Auchet (2003).

Andersen's legacy as a writer often cites his “preoccupation with symbolism, the unconscious and the absurd”. However, the unique specificities of his writing-- a playful, jolting style, “staccato-like” rhythm and prose rich with colloquialisms, and unique idioms is often forgotten. Translators from the late 19th-century onwards often attempted to convey Andersen’s more complex thematic material by producing elongated and meandering sentences, or by substituting certain repetitive words with synonyms. Importantly, these distinctive aspects of Andersen’s writing style – the syntactical experiments, excesses and repetitions, the punning and other word play – offer potential forms of reading pleasure.

The kiss one of these distinctly ambiguous motifs, both figuratively and literally: Scholarship related to Andersen's tales either overlooks the kiss or symbolically prescribes it under a psychoanalytic, even Oedipal lens. Since Andersen’s work has tended to be translated purely for younger audiences, criticism has too often focused on the tale’s moral dimensions or didactic qualities. I argue that the kiss is far more diverse—both on the page and in terms of a Queer reading. I propose that such a reading should surf an oscillation between paranoid and reparative affects: in both "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Mermaid," Andersen ties sensual abundance to images which evoke interconnections between characters, their setting, or heightened emotional states. Conversely, sensual absence and lack occurs in relation to isolation and grief.

This project ultimately interrogates how methods of sentiment analysis might intervene with the close reading process. How might computational distance between the self and a corpus of Andersen’s French and English translations reveal different emotional affects and valences across languages and cultural translational practices-- specifically as they pertains to the kiss? How might the process itself of running computational analysis affect one’s appreciation for Andersen's unique style and prose?

I do not seek to mine and analyze how Andersen's tales have circulated across linguistic and cultural boundaries, but rather to explore how interactions with texts at their surface can be the access point to their depth and complexity. In doing so, I hope to articulate a Queer reading that lies beyond what is hidden in depths and layers: again, one may be able to access a text’s deeper themes through its surface, rather than mine supposed layers in search for a conclusive 'truth'.

This paper examines untranslatability as a feminist and literary problem in digital humanities through a critical reading of selected poems by Sylvia Plath, informed by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early Picture Theory of meaning. Picture Theory proposes that language represents reality by functioning as a structured picture of possible states of affairs. While this model offers a powerful account of propositional meaning, it encounters significant limitations when applied to poetic language, which produces meaning through voice, irony, imagery, and contextual resonance rather than logical correspondence.

Focusing on a curated corpus of Plath’s poems. The paper foregrounds close literary reading as its primary method, attending to how poetic voice constructs situated and resistant forms of meaning. These poems are read as enacting resistance to patriarchal modes of knowledge that privilege neutrality, abstraction, and equivalence. Plath’s poetic language, rather than offering stable representations, destabilizes authoritative claims to objectivity and refuses fixed interpretive closure.

To place literary interpretation in dialogue with Digital Humanities methodologies, the study employs critical digital textual analysis using Voyant Tools to explore patterns of lexical repetition, collocation, and pronoun usage related to voice and authority. These computational representations are not treated as explanatory models but as translational processes that fragment and flatten poetic meaning. The resulting gap between literary interpretation and digital output is read as a site of untranslatability.

Drawing on feminist epistemology, the paper argues that untranslatability should not be understood as a methodological failure but as a productive critical concept. It reveals the epistemic assumptions embedded in computational approaches to meaning and highlights how poetic language resists being rendered into neutral or equivalent forms. By maintaining the primacy of literary analysis while critically engaging digital tools, the study positions untranslatability as a key lens for feminist literary scholarship in digital humanities and contributes to ongoing debates about translation, representation, and ethics in computational research.

This research-creation project examines how micro-media functioned as sites of cultural articulation during and after Iran’s 2022 Mahsa Amini uprising, when conventional political language became dangerous or impossible under conditions of surveillance and repression. Here, micro-media refers to small-scale, rapidly circulating visual units; images, gestures, and inscriptions, that operate outside institutional media and produce meaning through repetition and circulation. In this context, visual media do not merely represent resistance but actively generate new modes of political meaning-making. Under these conditions, certain forms of experience become difficult to articulate through language alone and instead emerge through visual and embodied practices.

Drawing on a multi-year archive of images, videos, and digital fragments circulating on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter/X, and Telegram, the project analyzes how Iranian protesters, particularly women and youth, developed a vernacular visual grammar of resistance. This grammar emerges through recurring elements: the body (tattoos, hair, gesture), urban surfaces (walls, posters), and reactivated Persian cultural symbols (pre-Islamic motifs, mythic imagery, historical references). These elements function not as nostalgic heritage, but as future-oriented resources for imagining a secular-feminist Iranian political horizon.

The project situates bodies, urban surfaces, and digital platforms as interconnected actants within a distributed media ecology, where meaning is not transmitted but produced through embodied and material practices. In line with approaches that understand media as performative rather than representational, these visual acts operate through repetition, circulation, and fragmentation, exceeding direct address and fixed interpretation.

Methodologically, the project combines visual analysis, digital ethnography, and research-creation. Rather than using artistic practice to illustrate the archive, the project develops a single video-based work that operates within the same visual logic (fragmentation, layering, and circulation) through which these images produce meaning. In this sense, research-creation functions as an epistemic method: a way of engaging the processes through which knowledge is materially and visually articulated, rather than solely interpreted.

By foregrounding ephemeral social media content as sites of theory-making, the project challenges dominant hierarchies of knowledge production within digital humanities. It argues that under conditions of repression, micro-media become primary sites of political articulation, enabling alternative epistemologies and new forms of collective imagination when formal language is constrained.