Chahna Ahuja
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Projects Archive

An extended collection of research papers, projects, analytical and creative experiments across methods, domains, form, content and my lived experiences.

Academic Research Published Article

The (Male) Gaze of Shadows: The Inner Lives of Women in the Works of Ismat Chughtai and Amrita Sher-Gil

In the 1930s-40s, the rhetoric of the colonialists and the Indian nationalists sounded similar, as each group’s modernizing mission viewed women as objects of desire and protection. How did Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu short stories and Amrita Sher-Gil’s paintings respond to this dominant patriarchal discourse? Critics have often read their overlapping explorations of women’s inner lives as ‘subverting’ the ‘male gaze.’ But considering the realist locations of their works are spaces of hetero-patriarchal imagination, where does the audience’s gaze turn? Is the subversion successful?

Apr 3, 2026 Read More →
AI/ML/NLP Interactive Storytelling Web Design and Dev

An Interactive Visual Archive of Belgian Postcards: Postscript, KU Leuven BiblioTech Hackathon 2026

This is the collaborative hackathon project that won the KU Leuven Bibliotech Hackathon 2026. For this project, my team PostScript and I explored the KU Leuven Postcards Collection and develops an interactive, educational, and exploratory approach to engaging with digitized cultural heritage. The primary output is a prototype interactive web interface designed for both researchers and the wider public, showcasing postcards from the city of Antwerp.

Mar 23, 2026 Read More →
Academic Research Interactive Storytelling

The Alvenhime Assassin: Interactive Visual Novel Game

Developed for the Information Structures & Implications course as part of the MSc Digital Humanities program in 2025-26, Alvenhime Assassin is an interactive visual novel mystery game inspired by tabletop Dungeons & Dragons–style whodunit investigations. The game was developed using the Ren’Py visual novel engine (Python) and features branching dialogue, interactive investigation mechanics, and a MySQL backend used to store clues, items, and investigation data.

Jan 1, 2026 Read More →
Academic Research AI/ML/NLP Data Analysis

Intimatopias in BTS Hurt/Comfort Fanfiction Tags: A Corpus-Based Keyword Analysis of Subgenre Tagging Practices on Archive of Our Own

Developed for Methods of Corpus Linguistics course as part of the MSc Digital Humanities program in 2025-26, this study examines the Hurt/Comfort (H/C) subgenre in English fanfiction of the K-pop boyband BTS on Archive of Our Own. These fanfiction narratives focus on moments of hurt followed by comfort between queer characters in this fandom. Using a corpus linguistics approach, keyword analysis of fanfiction tags helps identify patterns in how authors label H/C stories and how hurt and comfort are encoded in these stories.

Dec 31, 2025 Read More →
Academic Research AI/ML/NLP Data Analysis

Boy Meets Girl Meets Natural Language Processing: Binary Text Classification of RomCom Movies Using Movie Synposis

Developed for the Computational Linguistics course taught by Tim van de Cruys as part of the Advanced Master’s in Digital Humanities (academic year 2025-26) at KU Leuven, the scope of this project is to perform binary text classification of romcom as a movie subgenre based on plot synopses of films released in the twenty-first century (2000–2025).

Dec 30, 2025 Read More →
Academic Research Data Analysis

All the Metadata’s Stage: Text Mining and Network Analysis of 17th–19th Century British Comedy Titles

This study was developed as part of the Introduction to Digital Humanities course taught by Margherita Fantoli within the MSc Advanced Masters of Digital Humanities (2025-26) at KU Leuven. This project analyses the metadata of English stage dramas published between the 17th and 19th centuries, sourced from the British Library, in order to identify socio-cultural patterns of the period through distant reading methods in Digital Humanities.

Nov 30, 2025 Read More →
Academic Research

Archivist of ‘Feels’: Web Weaving as a Fragmentary Reading Practice in Tumblr’s Platformized Fan Culture (MA Thesis)

Shining a spotlight on the evolving role of the reader in the digital age, this MA Cultural Studies dissertation explores what it means to read in a hyperconnected world where media texts circulate as ‘fragments’ particularly within platformized fan communities. At the heart of this question lies Tumblr’s fragmentary fan reading practice, known as web weaving, both a symptom and a contagion of fragmentary reading and platformized fan culture.

Aug 12, 2025 Read More →
Web Design and Dev

Artist Website Design and Development

As part of my university internship for MA program in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven, I worked at DMW Gallery, Antwerp where I built a website for one of the gallery’s artists WordPress CMS with a custom frontend.

Dec 2, 2024 Read More →
Published Article

Opinion: ‘Girl Dinner’ in Horror and The Fear of a Hungry Woman (2024)

In an era where women’ girlboss’ and do ‘girlmath’ with their ‘gorgeous gorgeous girlies’ during ‘hot girl summer’ and eat their ‘girl dinner’, is there anything scarier than an unconstrained appetite of a woman whose ‘girl dinner’ refuses to be a marketing spectacle of ‘femininity’? A woman’s hunger in horror wrestles her desire with her shame. But she gorges anyway in a way we have longed to do in our guilt.

Mar 3, 2024 Read More →
Interactive Storytelling

The Hands-On Story

“Hands-On Story,” presents an audio visual narrative inviting the audience to contemplate the changing relationship between nature and human intimacy. The exhibit curated for an undergraduate course unfolded through illustrations showcasing hands’ continuously adapting form and function in the Anthropocene, along with an audio poetry walkthrough.

May 2, 2023 Read More →
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