Page of Reason, Vol. XX, No. 1, July 2023
Dispatches from your most humble servant, the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, Iona University.
Welcome to Volume XX, No. 1 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 and Mastodon @ITPS@historians.social.
Common Sounds
We are very excited to announce that Season 3, Episode 5 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 for the third season of their podcast, Public History in a Virtual Age. Co-hosts Dr. Kellen Heniford, historical consultant and formerly of the ITPS, and Jeanne Gutierrez, Curatorial Scholar in Women's History, 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.
This episode’s guest, Sean Fader, is currently an Assistant Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Photography and Imaging. Sean received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and his BFA from the New School in New York City. Fader is represented by Denny Dimin Gallery in New York City and Hong Kong. Fader is also a collective member of Antenna in New Orleans, where he had his most recent solo show, Insufficient Memory. Learn more about Sean here!
Common Acts, I
On Saturday 7/8, from 1:00-2:00 PM, ITPS Public Historian Michael Crowder will speak at St. Paul’s Church National Historical Site in Mount Vernon, NY, on the theme of “African-Americans and the American Revolution: An Exploration.” In-person attendance at 897 S. Columbus Ave., Mount Vernon, NY. Zoom attendance is also available, contact St. Paul’s here for more information.
Common Acts, II
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 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!