Page of Reason, Vol. XXI, September 2023
Dispatches from your most humble servant, the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, Iona University.
Welcome to Volume XXI, 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, Mastodon @ITPS@historians.social, BlueSky @theitps.bsky.social, and TikTok @itps1.
Common Sounds
We are very excited to announce that Season 3, Episode 7 of ITPS Pod “Public History in a Virtual Age” is now live! Listen here, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
This episode’s guest, Deborah Hamer, is the Director of the The New Netherland Institute (NNI). For more about the NNI here!
Common Acts
ITPS Director Dr. Nora Slonimsky joined C SPAN’s “Books That Shaped America” to discuss the Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the Age of Revolutions. The episode airs on Monday, September 28, 2023 at 9:00 PM ET. More info available here!
Mark your calendars!
Full details forthcoming, but mark October 24, 2023 on your calendars! The ITPS and Iona University are excited to host a conversation and Q & A exploring themes of the politics of American Revolution historical memory, and more! See Common Facts below for a hints about the participants…
Common Campus
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The ITPS is happy to announce a new Tik Tok series, “In The Vault,” in which Iona University undergraduate students encounter and engage with archival materials in the Thomas Paine National Historical Association collection. Enjoy, and thanks to a certain singer for helping to sound track Charles’s visit with a track from her vault!
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departments, which develops novel methodologies for (semi) automated software-based identification of the creator(s) of historical documents, whose authorship is either unknown or disputed.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!