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.