Page of Reason, Vol. XXIII, November 2023
Dispatches from your most humble servant, the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, Iona University.
Welcome to Volume XXIII 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, BlueSky @theitps.bsky.social, Mastodon @ITPS@historians.social, and TikTok @itps1.
Common Campus
Best wishes for a wonderful autumn season from Ryan Library on the beautiful Iona University campus, home of the ITPS!
Common Sounds
We are very excited to announce that Season 3, Episode 9 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, Meredith Horsford, is the Executive Director at Historic House Trust of NYC and Director of Historic Houses at the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Read more about the activities of the Historic House Trust!
Common Acts
Dr. David Waldstreicher (CUNY Graduate Center) and Dr. Benjamin Carp (Brooklyn College, CUNY) recently joined the ITPS for a conversation about all things Phillis Wheatley, the Great New York Fire of 1776, the American Revolution and more. Enjoy the video of their conversation with ITPS Public Historian Dr. Michael Crowder!
Common Words
CFP Alert, Deadline November 15, 2023!
Intellectual Histories of the American Revolution, Kylemore Abbey, Ireland, August 15-17, 2024. Consider proposing a paper for this exciting symposium organized by friends of the ITPS, to convene next year with support from the International Center for Thomas Jefferson Studies and the University of Notre Dame. Read the CFP in full here.
CFP snippet: “How did people change the way they thought about the world during the era of the American Revolution—and how did the way they thought change the world? Ideas and ideologies no longer occupy the central role they once played in the story of the Revolution as told by historians. Yet the advance of revolutionary scholarship has opened up new opportunities for intellectual history. The challenges posed by new forms of social and cultural history, along with the rise of international and continental perspectives, have pushed scholars to develop new ways of thinking about ideas in the era of the Revolution. By revising old assumptions about what thought looks like, redrawing the roster of its actors, sources, and settings, scholars have generated a wellspring of intellectual histories of the American Revolution...”
To propose a paper, please send a 500-word abstract and 1–2-page C.V. in a single .PDF or .DOC file to amrevhistories@gmail.com by 15 November 2023. Please contact the symposium organizers, Sara Georgini and Tom Cutterham, with any questions.
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!