Gothic Music

Entry for Encyclopedia of the Gothi

Gothic Tourism

From Strawberry Hill to the London Dungeon, Alton Towers to Barnageddon, Gothic tourism is a fascinating, and sometimes controversial, subject. Emma McEvoy considers some of the origins of Gothic tourism and discusses Gothic itself as a touristic mode. Through studies of ghost walks, scare attractions, Dennis Severs' House, Madame Tussaud's, the Necrobus, castles, prison museums, phantasmagoria shows, the 'Gothick' design of Elizabeth Percy at Alnwick Castle, a party at Fonthill Abbey, and a poison garden, McEvoy examines Gothic tourism in relation to literature, film, folklore, heritage management, arts programming, and the 'edutainment' business

Matthew Lewis

Entry on Matthew Lewis for Encyclopedia of the Gothi

'I hate this job': Guiding Ripper Tours in the East End

On the streets of Whitechapel, London, independent tour guides are operating where official heritage organizations will not tread. The East End has recently experienced a rapid proliferation of thanatourism in the form of Ripper tours and a Ripper ‘museum’. This essay offers a survey and account of this Ripper tourism. Its central concern is with the Ripper tours, which it considers as street theatre. The essay looks at the narrative and performance modes guides draw on to negotiate their highly contentious subject matter, and considers the tours’ complex relation to the Gothic

Groundless metaphors and living maps in the writing of Mary Shelley

In this article I consider Mary Shelley's use of figuration, examining its characteristic forms. In three main sections address her use of allegory, what I call the "infection of the metaphorical", and the groundless metaphor. Shelley's writing will be looked at in dialogic relation to her predecessors and contemporaries and her peculiar stylistics discussed in terms of her sceptical attitude toward, and undermining of Romantic idealism. There will be specific emphasis on her treatment of favourite Romantic projects - nature, writing the self and the perceiving mind. Shelley will be discussed both as revisionist and saboteuse in her attitude to language

'Really, though secretly, a papist': G.K. Chesterton's and J. Meade Falkner's rewritings of the gothic

This article considers the rewriting of those Gothic conventions which are most symptomatic of Gothic anti-Catholicism in the works of Catholic-sympathizing authors, J. Meade Falkner, G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922, creates a priest committed to divine rationality and exposes contemporary Protestant "superstition". J. Meade's Moonfleet, inspired by Gothic revivalism - a movement in many respects antithetical to the sentiments of the Gothic novel - rewrites the relations between father and son, past and present, individual and community

Searching for Higgs decays to four bottom quarks at LHCb

We discuss the feasibility of seeing a Higgs boson which decays to four bottom quarks through a pair of (pseudo-)scalars at the LHCb experiment to argue that the use of b-physics triggers and off-line vertex reconstruction, as opposed to jet triggers with b tagging, may be more effective for this signal. Focusing on inclusive production for the Higgs, we find that for light scalar masses below 20 GeV, signal reconstruction efficiencies of order a few percent may be enough for LHCb to find evidence for a Higgs with a dominant 4b decay channel.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Single- and Multi-Distribution Dimensionality Reduction Approaches for a Better Data Structure Capturing

In recent years, the huge expansion of digital technologies has vastly increased the volume of data to be explored, such that reducing the dimensionality of data is an essential step in data exploration. The integrity of a dimensionality reduction technique relates to the goodness of maintaining the data structure. Dimensionality reduction techniques such as Principal Component Analyses (PCA) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) globally preserve the distance ranking at the expense of neglecting small-distance preservation. Conversely, the structure capturing of some other methods such as Isomap, Locally Linear Embedding (LLE), Laplacian Eigenmaps t-Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (t-SNE), Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), and TriMap rely on the number of neighbours considered. This paper presents a dimensionality reduction technique, Same Degree Distribution (SDD) that does not rely on the number of neighbours, thanks to using degree-distributions in both high and low dimensional spaces. Degree-distribution is similar to Student-t distribution and is less expensive than Gaussian distribution. As such, it enables better global data preservation in less computational time. Moreover, to improve the data structure capturing, SDD has been extended to Multi-SDDs (MSDD), which employs various degree distributions on top of SDD. The proposed approach and its extension demonstrated a greater performance compared with eight other benchmark methods, tested in several popular synthetics and real datasets such as Iris, Breast Cancer, Swiss Roll, MNIST, and Make Blob evaluated by the co-ranking matrix and Kendall’s Tau coefficient. For further work, we aim to approximate the number of distributions and their degrees in relation to the given dataset. Reducing the computational complexity is another objective for further work