Page of Reason, Vol. XXIV, February 2024
Dispatches from your most humble servant, the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, Iona University.
Welcome to Volume XXIV 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 Acts
Mark your calendars!
Inspired by undergraduate student internship collaborations between the ITPS and CMI at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, on April 5, 2024, Iona University will host an interdisciplinary event connecting Early American musical, political, and cultural history to twenty-first century Revolutionary Era commemoration. The event, hosted at Iona University’s new Bronxville campus, will begin with a roundtable discussion of Early American historians of music and politics, and continue with a musical program of eighteenth-century tunes translated into twentieth-first century vernacular, written and directed by Dr. Adam Rosado, Assistant Professor of Music and Director of the Music Ensemble at Iona University. The performance will be held in the Somme Center for Worship and Performing Arts at Iona University’s new Bronxville campus.
Common Reads
We are very excited to announce the impending publication of American Revolutions in The Digital Age (Cornell University Press, August 2024), edited by ITPS Director Dr. Nora Slonimsky, Dr. Mark Boonshoft (Virginia Military Institute), and Dr. Ben Wright (University of Texas-Dallas).
Employing a host of innovative digital research methods, the volume’s essays challenge long-held assumptions about the American past. In addition, this collection uniquely demonstrates how contemporary anxieties about an array of topics, including media disinformation, patriarchy, economic inequality, and public memory, can be better understood through careful considerations of early American history.
An open-access volume, you can find pre-order information here— and stay tuned for further updates!
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 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!