284 research outputs found
The Victorian Short Story Forum:An Introduction
No full textThis 1,500 word essay introduces the eight articles that comprise this edition of the Victorian Review journal's 'Forum' feature: a collection of short essays, guest-edited by Victoria Margree, and developed from a 2018 symposium on the Victorian short story hosted by the University of Brighton and the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA)
Vicky Henderson
No full textthis paper. The second author is supported by an Advanced Fellowship from the EPSRC. The third author acknowledges partial financial support from DAAD, EPSRC and KW
Bayesian mixture estimation for perceptual grouping
No full textPerceptual grouping is the process by which a set of image elements is divided into distinct “objects” or components. In this dissertation I propose a Bayesian framework for understanding perceptual grouping, in which the goal of the computation is to estimate the organization that best explains the observed configuration of image elements. I formalize the problem of perceptual grouping as a mixture estimation problem, where it is assumed that the configuration of elements is generated by a set of distinct components (or ”objects”), whose underlying parameters one seeks to estimate. In the first part of this dissertation I will propose a simplified version of the framework and show how it can be used to estimate the number of objects, more specifically clusters of dots, present in the image. Across two experiments I show how the model gives an accurate and quantitatively precise account of subjects’ numerosity judgments, while at the same time outperforming more standard accounts for dot clustering. In the second part of the dissertation this simplified framework is expanded to estimate a hierarchical representation of the image elements. This framework can easily be adjusted to different subproblems of perceptual grouping. Here I will show how an instantiation of our framework for contour integration, part decomposition, and shape completion can account for several key perceptual phenomena and previously collected human subject data.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Vicky Froye
British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930:Our Own Ghostliness
No full textThis book explores women’s short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that while literary ghosts provided women a form through which to negotiate their changing circumstances, they could have both subversive and conservative implications. Stories by Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant become troubled by uncanny reminders of the origins of British wealth in domestic and foreign exploitation. Corpse-like revenants are deployed by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edith Nesbit to interrogate masculine aestheticisation of female death. In the culturally-hybrid supernaturalism of Alice Perrin, the ‘Marriage Question’ migrates to colonial India. And innovative Gothic stories by May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt interrogate just how far gender relations have progressed in the post-First World War period. Study of these writers’ fictions productively problematizes literary histories about the “golden age” of the ghost story, and about the transition from Victorianism to modernism
The Dangerous utopianism of Shulamith Firestone:Reclaiming The Dialectic of Sex as feminist science fiction
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Shulamith Firestone:why the radical feminist who wanted to abolish pregnancy remains relevant
No full textWhen the writer Shulamith Firestone published her feminist manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, in 1970, it became a publishing sensation. Half a century later, it’s her call for the development of artificial wombs for which she has become, often mockingly, remembered. But with abortion rights and reproductive technologies both urgent issues today, her arguments about the exploitation of women’s reproductive labour remain very relevant
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