The materiality of the intangible: Literary metaphor in multimodal texts

Based on a larger practice-based research project in digital writing, this article examines how the materiality of digital media contributes to a layered metaphor that delivers meaning, reflects on the cognitive processes (the writer’s and the reader’s) of navigation and generates a dynamic narrative structure through multimodality, unnatural narration and user interaction. Many writers and artists engage with their chosen medium through an instinctive understanding of the materials at hand, gained through experience; the explicit study of a medium’s materiality is not always required for artistic success, however, that may be judged. This article offers insights into the creative process of creating digital, multimodal fiction, based on a practice-based research project designed to explore the effects of digital media on author and text, and argues that digital media have a significant effect on the outcome of the artefact itself. Awareness of these effects, their variations according to hardware and software, and the affordances of these various materials offer the digital writer greater insight and capability to craft his/her texts for the desired metaphorical meaning

Semi-parametric inference for the absorption features of a growth-fragmentation model

In the present paper, we focus on semi-parametric methods for estimating the absorption probability and the distribution of the absorbing time of a growth-fragmentation model observed within a long time interval. We establish that the absorption probability is the unique solution in an appropriate space of a Fredholm equation of the second kind whose parameters are unknown. We estimate this important characteristic of the underlying process by solving numerically the estimated Fredholm equation. Even if the study has been conducted for a particular model, our method is quite general