Page of Reason, Vol. XIX, June 2023
Dispatches from your most humble servant, the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, Iona University.
Welcome to Volume XIX of Page of Reason, a newsletter of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies (ITPS), Iona University, New Rochelle, NY! Find more information about the ITPS and our activities at our Research Portal, theitps.org and follow us on Twitter @TheITPS.
Common Sounds
We are very excited to announce that Season 3, Episode 4 of ITPS Pod “Public History in a Virtual Age” is now live! Listen here, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
The New-York Historical Society's Center for Women's History is pleased to partner with the ITPS (Institute for Thomas Paine Studies) at Iona University for the third season of their podcast, Public History in a Virtual Age. In the first half of the season, co-hosts Dr. Kellen Heniford, historical consultant and formerly of the ITPS, and Jeanne Gutierrez, Curatorial Scholar in Women's History, will interview curators, educators, and scholars at the New-York Historical Society to explore the many ways in which New York's first museum presents women's history and gender history to the public. The second half of the season will focus specifically on how public historians in and around New York City address the history of women who are underrepresented in museum and archival collections, with a focus on enslaved women, Indigenous women, and immigrant women.
This episode’s guest, Madeline DeDe-Panken, is a former Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society and the co-chair of the CUNY Public History Collective.
Common Words
Exciting new development for researchers and scholars across disciplines!
Iona University and the ITPS are pleased to announce the public release of the Text Analysis Project (TAP) software, designed to assist researchers in text attribution. TAP is multi-disciplinary project led by the ITPS with the Computer Science, English, and History departments, which develops novel methodologies for (semi) automated software-based identification of the creator(s) of historical documents, whose authorship is either unknown or disputed. The project uses advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques to identify and learn the writing styles of known authors, then compares the style of the writer of an unattributed document to the known authors’ styles, identifying a potential match. The project thus far has clarified much of the Paine Canon, and contributed numerous new works to it, thereby adding to the field of computer author attribution methodology. This project recently began widening its scope beyond Thomas Paine in order to pursue a wider corpus of writers in the late eighteenth century, especially involving newspaper publication in the 1790s.
Special thanks to Dr. Smiljana Petrovic and Dr. Lubomir Ivanov of Iona University, and Iona alumnus Sean Campbell for adapting the Java Graphical Author Attribution Program (JGAAP) in developing TAP, and maintaining the project’s source code.
For access to the TAP files via Github, and introductory videos with instructions to begin using TAP, visit the ITPS Portal. Email the ITPS at itps@iona.edu with questions!
Common Acts
CFP alert!
The Institute for Thomas Paine Studies (ITPS) at Iona University invites submissions for a hybrid online and in-person symposium on the topic of “Communication and Power in Early America.” This symposium aims to explore how communication shaped, reflected, and challenged power relations in North America from 1750-1850. The organizers have ambitions of extending this conversation through a scholarly anthology and/or a journal special edition.
A symposium will take place October 6-7, 2023, with both in-person and online opportunities for presentation. The in-person component will take place at the ITPS at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York. To submit a proposal, please send a single document including a brief biographical statement and abstract of no more than 300 words to communicationandpower@gmail.com by June 1, 2023. Please feel free to reach out to the symposium organizing committee — Mark Boonshoft, Katlyn Carter, Carolyn Eastman, Nora Slonimsky, and Ben Wright– with any questions.
Common Campus
Iona University’s Scholars’ Day in April featured a panel of students from the ITPS Public History and Digital Humanities minor degree program, focusing on the theories and practices of PH and DH. Learn more about the program here, and congratulations to Emily Varker, Denyil Phillips, and Elijah Borges for their fantastic presentations, including Elijah’s presentation based on his internship research in collaboration with George Washington’s Mount Vernon “Early American Music Manuscripts Database”!
Common Views
In October 2022, the ITPS welcomed Sid Lapidus, renowned philanthropist and collector, for a conversation with Karin Wulf, the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of History at Brown University to Iona University. Sid and Karin discussed the Lapidus Collection at Iona University, a repository of antique books, bibliographies, and scholarly monographs that relate to the history of the eighteenth century. The Lapidus collection includes materials on the history of slavery and anti-slavery, book history, revolution, and Thomas Paine himself. Sid and Karin shared insights into collecting, archives, and the value they bring for education and learning. Enjoy!
Common Facts
Thanks to recent, generous donations, our Lapidus Collection of Revolutionary Era historiography is growing rapidly! We’ve begun a series of “Classic Covers” on ITPS social media, and this edition of Common Facts is inspired by this campaign. Name the author and title of the book in this snippet image:
Email itps@iona.edu with your answer!