Digital Humanities

The ITPS leads a multi-disciplinary project 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departments, which develops novel methodologies for (semi) automated software-based identification of the creator(s) of historical documents, whose authorship is either unknown or disputed.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 eighteenth century authors. It then compares the style of the writer of an unattributed document to the known authors’ styles, identifying a potential match. The project 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.

The ITPS community has published a wide range of scholarly and popular historical works. Recent publications include:

The Legacy of Thomas Paine in the Transatlantic World, featuring an essay by Gary Berton.
New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies, eds., Dr. Scott Cleary and Dr. Ivy Stabell.
L.Ivanov, A.Aebig, S.Meerman, “Lexical Stress-Based Authorship Attribution with Accurate Pronunciation Patterns Selection”, submitted to Text, Speech, and Dialog (TSD’18) conference, Brno, Czech Republic, 9/18
S.Petrovic, G.Berton, S.Campbell, L.Ivanov, “Attribution of 18th Century Political Writings Using Machine Learning”, Journal of Technologies in Society, v.11, issue 3, pp.1-13, 10/15
L.Ivanov, S.Petrovic, “Using Lexical Stress in Authorship Attribution of Historical Texts”, Chapter, Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Text, Speech, and Dialogue, v.9302, pp.105-113, 9/15
L.Ivanov, "Collaborative Software Development: The Thomas Paine Encyclopedia", Proceedings of FECS'14, (ISBN #: 1-60132-271-2, pages 394-398), Las Vegas, NV, 7/21-24/2014
S.Petrovic, G.Berton, R.Schiaffino, L.Ivanov, "Authorship Attribution of Thomas Paine Works", Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Mining DMIN'14 (ISBN #: 1-60132-267-4, pages 182-188), 7/12-24/2014