Page of Reason, Vol. XXII, October 2023
Dispatches from your most humble servant, the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, Iona University.
Welcome to Volume XXII, 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 8 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, Michael Galban, is the Historic Site Manager of Ganondagan State Historic Site and the curator of the Seneca Art & Culture Center.
Common Acts
Mark your calendars!
On 10/24/2023 at 6:00 PM, join us for a special discussion and Q & A with Dr. Waldstreicher (CUNY Graduate Center) and Dr. Benjamin Carp (Brooklyn College, CUNY) about the intersections between their recent works. In-Person at Ryan Library 800, Iona University, and virtual via Zoom. ITPS Public Historian Dr. Michael Crowder will moderate the Q & A. Find more info about in-person registration and Zoom registration.
On September 28, ITPS Director Dr. Nora Slonimsky joined C SPAN’s “Books That Shaped America” to discuss the Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Watch Dr. Slonimsky discuss all things Paine and the Age of Revolutions here!
Common Campus
This weekend, the ITPS is very excited to host 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. Participants are encouraged to consider this symposium as a potential first step toward publication and will be expected to present their work as well as read and comment on the work of other participants. More updates soon!
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 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!