126 BnF coins integrated into Antigonid Coins Online

One hundred twenty-six coins from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, recently cataloged by Julien Olivier, have been incorporated into the newly-released Antigonid Coins Online (AGCO), which so far includes the coinage of Demetrius Poliorcetes. Roughly a dozen of these coins were already accessible through AGCO upon its launch since a handful of the coins of Demetrius are cross-linked with posthumous issues in the name of Alexander the Great in PELLA (related specimens are displayed in Numishare when they link directly to a type URI or implied to be the same via skos:exactMatch).

A BnF example of Demetrius 51

There are now 433 total specimens connected to the 182 types of Demetrius Poliorcetes. Two-thirds of the types are connected to at least one physical specimens, and about 40% (77 types) of the corpus links to at least one photographed coin. This number will grow, as the majority of the ANS' coins of Demetrius have not been photographed yet.

ANS launches the first phase of Antigonid Coins Online

After soft-launching last week to give our partners (in the NUMiD consortium, particularly!) a chance to begin cataloging coinage, we are formally announcing the release of Antigonid Coins Online. The first phase of this project includes 182 types of Demetrius Poliorcetes from Edward T. Newell's The Coinages of Demetrius Poliorcetes (1927). We will, in time, introduce typologies for the remaining kings of this Successor dynasty.

At this juncture, it includes more than 300 coins from 11 collections, from both large and small museums. Currently, the handful of coins from the British Museum and Bibliotheque nationale de France are connected to typologies from PELLA that are the same coin type. Karsten Dahmen began cataloging Berlin's coins of Demetrius almost immediately, and a few German university museums soon followed. I updated my script for harvesting Newell references from Harvard Art Museums as well as added another dozen from MFA Boston into the master spreadsheet, which I also reprocessed from a script I had written early. The first coin of Demetrius harvested into Nomisma was actually from the Fralin Museum at the University of Virginia, since I still maintain that project. A further 200 or so were cataloged by Lauren Tomanelli, before she departed the ANS to pursue her archaeology PhD at the University of Arizona, and Peter van Alfen, who referred to the trays for those coins not yet photographed.

Demetrius 159

Additionally, Lauren drew 26 new monograms that are unique (thus far) to the coinage of Demetrius Poliorcetes, while also inserting URIs to monograms from PELLA and PCO into the types, when it is apparent they symbols are semantically identical. These coins now appear in the Hellenistic Royal Coinages union typology, and are available for comparative queries of measurements, geographic distribution, etc. The HRC project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Antigonid Coins Online was not part of the original set of deliverables for HRC, but as in many of our grant-funded projects, we always exceed expectations.

Initial Binders of Richard Schaefer's Roman Republican Die Study Now Online

Richard Schaefer has undertaken the most comprehensive die study of Roman Republican coinage, a process that has taken many years, and has culminated in 14 binders of pasted coin photographs and annotations, in addition to loose clippings stored a series of boxes.

Lucia Carbone and Liv Mariah Yarrow have supervised the digitization of these resources as part of the Roman Republican Die Project (RRDP). This entails not only scanning the images of the binders and clippings, but also the creation of spreadsheets for each RRC type, including a listing of each obverse and reverse die, and a number of occurrences for each die. Eventually these statistical data will be published and made accessible through Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO). In this initial phase of the project, we are aiming to publish the binders and the clippings, assembled as TEI files of facsimile images, published the the ANS archival platform, Archer and linked to CRRO.

Interface for Schaefer's RRDP Binder 1

This method of publication is similar to the Newell notebooks of coin hoards that we digitized and annotated for Hellenistic Royal Coinages in that the images are published through our IIIF server and the TEI file is serialized into a IIIF JSON-LD manifest for display in Mirador. The difference is that the page images in the RRDP are not (yet) annotated, but the pages still correspond to one or more RRC URIs published in CRRO. In order to link individual pages URIs in a manner that can be expressed in our implementation of OpenAnnotation RDF, I made some code updates to support the use of the @facs TEI attribute that points each term to a facsimile @xml:id:

<textClass>
  <classCode scheme="http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/">300264354</classCode>
  <keywords scheme="nmo:TypeSeriesItem">
    <term ref="http://numismatics.org/crro/id/rrc-97.1b" 
      facs="#schaefer_097-1b_b05_p001-0">RRC 97/1b</term>
    <term ref="http://numismatics.org/crro/id/rrc-354.1" 
      facs="#schaefer_354-1_b05_p002">RRC 354/1</term>
    <term ref="http://numismatics.org/crro/id/rrc-354.1" 
      facs="#schaefer_354-1_b05_p003-0">RRC 354/1</term>
  </keywords>
</textClass>

The coin types appear in the index terms underneath the page turner, similar to the Newell notebooks. I made some additional code updates to EADitor (the framework on which Archer is built) to read term URIs in order to index them into the search engine more effectively, creating new Hoard and Coin Type facet lists in the browse page.

Archer browse page with new Coin Type facet (includes HRC types from Newell notebooks)

So far we have published Schaefer's 14 binders to Archer, but the clippings images (organized in batches of 100 RRC numbers) will be published by the end of this month or in early August. That will conclude the first phase of publication, enabling the seamless interoperability between these archival documents and RRC types published in CRRO. Like other typology projects published in Numishare, CRRO's configuration has been updated to interact with Archer's SPARQL endpoint, making these resources available directly in CRRO's user interface.

Binder 1, as it appears in RRC 302/1

The next phase will entail minting URIs for each distinct obverse and reverse die in a new standalone Numishare project, and making some code updates to support the publication of dies and linking to types.