Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this work, Martha McGill looks to move the discussion of the supernatural in Scotland away from witches and to refocus our attention on the idea of the ghost in the Scottish psyche between 1685 and 1830. Looking beyond the traditional bounds of the Enlightenment period has allowed for developments beyond the late eighteenth century to be taken into account, and enabled McGill to chart the impact of changing ideas about rationality and the supernatural on the belief in ghosts among the educated Scottish population. This is contrasted with the relatively consistent representation of ghosts in ballads, broadsides and other forms of popular culture, summarised in the final chapter. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, she brings together literary ghost stories with legal cases and personal accounts, to chart the evolving relationship between the Scots and their ghosts. This body of evidence allows her discussion to go beyond existing scholarship which focuses on the literary or the historical, demonstrating how intertwined and interrelated such accounts are. Acknowledging the rich historiography of ghosts in Europe during the period, and cautioning against a notion of Scottish exceptionalism, McGill nevertheless makes a clear, and well supported, case for a distinctly Scottish attitude to, and understanding of, ghosts during the Enlightenment. She repeatedly draws comparison between the situation in England and Scotland, and demonstrates that Scotland’s attitudes to ghosts and the supernatural was consistently different to that of her southern neighbour. McGill makes it clear that it is not the ghosts themselves or the question of their existence which are the focus of her study, but the ideas and attitudes people displayed toward them, and how this in turn offers insights into the shifting intellectual culture of the period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".