Building The Ark: Text World Theory and the evolution of dystopian epistolary

Told through a series of interrelated documents (including emails, text messages, newspaper clippings and blog posts), Annabel Smith’s interactive digital novel The Ark epitomises the contemporary hybridity of the dystopian genre. Designed to be fully immersive, the story can be engaged with across media, enabling readers to ‘dive deeper into the world of the novel’ and challenge how they experience dystopian texts. Taking a Text-World-Theory perspective, I examine the implications of this challenge, investigating the impact of transmedial storytelling on world-building and exploring the creative evolution of dystopian epistolary more broadly. In analysing both the ebook element of The Ark and certain facets of its companion pieces (which take the form of a dynamic website and a smartphone app), I investigate the creation of the novel’s text-worlds, considering the process of multimodal meaning construction, examining the conceptual intricacies of the epistolary form and exploring the influence of paratextual matter on world-building and construal. In doing so, I offer new insights into the conceptualisation of ‘empty text-worlds’, extend Gibbons’ discussions of transmedial world-creation and argue for a more nuanced understanding of dystopian epistolary as framed within Text World Theory

Braid arrangement bimonoids and the toric variety of the permutohedron

We show that the toric variety of the permutohedron (=permutohedral space) has the structure of a cocommutative bimonoid in species, with multiplication/comultiplication given by embedding/projecting-onto boundary divisors. In terms of Losev-Manin's description of permutohedral space as a moduli space, multiplication is concatenation of strings of Riemann spheres and comultiplication is forgetting marked points. In this way, the bimonoid structure is an analog of the cyclic operad structure on the moduli space of genus zero marked curves. Covariant/contravariant data on permutohedral space is endowed with the structure of cocommutative/commutative bimonoids by pushing-forward/pulling-back data along the (co)multiplication. Many well-known combinatorial objects index data on permutohedral space. Moreover, combinatorial objects often have the structure of bimonoids, with multiplication/comultiplication given by merging/restricting objects in some way. We prove that the bimonoid structure enjoyed by these indexing combinatorial objects coincides with that induced by the bimonoid structure of permutohedral space. Thus, permutohedral space may be viewed as a fundamental underlying object which geometrically interprets many combinatorial Hopf algebras. Aguiar-Mahajan have shown that classical combinatorial Hopf theory is based on the braid hyperplane arrangement in a crucial way. This paper aims to similarly establish permutohedral space as a central object, providing an even more unified perspective. The main motivation for this work concerns Feynman amplitudes in the Schwinger parametrization, which become integrals over permutohedral space if one blows-up everything in the resolution of singularities. Then the Hopf algebra structure of Feynman graphs, first appearing in the work of Connes-Kreimer, coincides with that induced by the bimonoid structure of permutohedral space

Covering theory of buildings and their quotients

PhD ThesisWe introduce structures which model the quotients of Bruhat-Tits buildings by typepreserving group actions. These structures, which we call Weyl graphs, generalize chamber systems of type M by allowing 2-residues to be quotients of generalized polygons. Weyl graphs also generalize Tits amalgams with a trivial chamber stabilizer group by allowing for group actions which are not chamber-transitive. We develop covering theory of Weyl graphs, and characterize buildings as connected, simply connected Weyl graphs. We describe a procedure for obtaining a group presentation of the fundamental group of a Weyl graph W, which acts naturally on the universal cover of W. We present an application of the theory of Weyl graphs to Singer lattices. We construct the Singer cyclic lattices of type M, where mst 2 f2; 3;1g for all s; t 2 S. In particular, by taking the Davis realization of a building, we obtain new examples of lattices in polyhedral complexes

Experiencing dystopia through Umwelt: Modelling the nonhuman animal in Hollow Kingdom

The experience of nonhuman animals is typically neglected in dystopian fiction, particularly as concerns the experiences of domestic pets. The presence of such creatures in dystopia is often notable only by their absence, with animal life (or the lack thereof) being a characteristic, albeit peripheral, marker of social or environmental loss. In recent years, however, authors have been increasingly drawn to the role of animals in the end times, presenting dystopian worlds from the perspective of animal characters. Exploring the projection of nonhuman consciousness in contemporary dystopia, I look to investigate this phenomenon, focusing on the modelling of animal minds in Hollow Kingdom. Drawing upon the work of Caracciolo and Herman, I analyse the presentation of animal narration, exploring how we attribute consciousness to nonhuman characters and how, in turn, the conceptualisation of Hollow Kingdom is given texture as a result of the animal voices, perceptions and attitudes it presents

Mechanism of the Very Efficient Quenching of Tryptophan Fluorescence in Human γD- and γS-Crystallins: The γ-Crystallin Fold May Have Evolved To Protect Tryptophan Residues from Ultraviolet Photodamage†

Proteins exposed to UV radiation are subject to irreversible photodamage through covalent modification of tryptophans (Trps) and other UV-absorbing amino acids. Crystallins, the major protein components of the vertebrate eye lens that maintain lens transparency, are exposed to ambient UV radiation throughout life. The duplicated β-sheet Greek key domains of β- and γ-crystallins in humans and all other vertebrates each have two conserved buried Trps. Experiments and computation showed that the fluorescence of these Trps in human γD-crystallin is very efficiently quenched in the native state by electrostatically enabled electron transfer to a backbone amide [Chen et al. (2006) Biochemistry 45, 11552−11563]. This dispersal of the excited state energy would be expected to minimize protein damage from covalent scission of the excited Trp ring. We report here both experiments and computation showing that the same fast electron transfer mechanism is operating in a different crystallin, human γS-crystallin. Examination of solved structures of other crystallins reveals that the Trp conformation, as well as favorably oriented bound waters, and the proximity of the backbone carbonyl oxygen of the n − 3 residues before the quenched Trps (residue n), are conserved in most crystallins. These results indicate that fast charge transfer quenching is an evolved property of this protein fold, probably protecting it from UV-induced photodamage. This UV resistance may have contributed to the selection of the Greek key fold as the major lens protein in all vertebrates.National Eye Institute (Grant EY 015834