What becomes of comparison when language is operationalized as data, translation is increasingly automated, and media infrastructures condition every act of reading, writing, and circulation? Centering mediation as a key framework, this panel invites papers that rethink core practices of comparative literature under conditions informed by algorithmic processing, platform logics, and the technical encoding of language. 

Comparative practice has never not been mediated by the infrastructures and institutions that standardize language and shape literary worlds, whether through dictionaries, grammars, scripts, archives or technologies of print, sound, and visuality. Rather than treating AI or digital media as novel disruptions, we are interested in approaches that situate the present within longer histories of philology, translation, and media theory, to ask how language has become thinkable as something that can be encoded and compared at scale. 

Possible topics include machine translation and large language models; the status of language as both expressive and computational; the transformation of equivalence, untranslatability, and linguistic difference; infrastructures of textual circulation and interpretation; and global or translingual perspectives. The panel draws together scholars working across comparative literature, media theory, digital humanities, and translation studies, especially those engaged with the intertwined questions of language and media.