More than 2,000 coins of Hadrian from the British Museum added to OCRE

I have received a major update from Richard Abdy, curator at the British Museum and author of the most recent RIC volume on Hadrian, which was published to OCRE in June of 2020. Nearly 2,300 coins from the British Museum have been linked to Hadrian type URIs in the new volume, an increase by about 2,000 over the relatively small number of Hadrianic coins the BM had previously contributed to OCRE. The photographic coverage of Hadrian types is nearly complete. There are, in fact, about 850 types where the British Museum specimen is the only photographed example: about one-quarter of all Hadrianic coin types.

Furthermore, I queried the BM's API for each coin to extract IIIF service URIs, when available. This extended to all of the BM's contributions to the Nomisma.org ecosystem (Iron Age, Hellenistic, and Roman coinage), and about 16,000 of the 72,000 total coins from the British Museum have zoomable IIIF images.

A British Museum example of Hadrian 103

The British Museum's API for individual objects is not publicized, but I happened upon it by looking at the console in Firefox to locate the British Museum's IIIF URI pattern (which is also not publicized). The ID portion of the object URI serves as the 'id' request parameter for the API, e.g., https://www.britishmuseum.org/api/_object?id=C_1872-0709-376.

The IIIF URL is 'zoom' property for each 'processed' in the 'multimedia' array. This is a relative path that should be appended to https://media.britishmuseum.org/iiif/. The other static jpg files paths are appended to https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/.

Frustratingly, the object metadata are not encoded in the JSON response as clean and machine-readable. It is possible to parse data from the escaped HTML in 'xtemplate', but it requires a little clean-up. I was able to parse the measurements for the Hadrianic coins from the xtemplate for the Hadrianic coins in OpenRefine, since they weren't in the the spreadsheet export I had received.

Improved geographic context for other Nomisma concept types

I have made some modifications to the underlying SPARQL queries to improve the geographic distribution of regions and dynasties in Nomisma.org.

Previously, a map for a region would show points for coin hoards that contained a coin explicitly from that region. However, it did not exploit the inherent geographic hierarchy expressed by skos:broader between mints and parent regions. For example, there are numerous hoards that contain coins from Syracuse, but the map for Sicily did not show them, except for a small handful of hoards that contained Sicilian coins from an uncertain mint (_: nmo:hasRegion nm:sicily). As illustrated below, the coverage for Sicily has been expanded well beyond the two hoards previously depicted to numerous examples: most in Sicily, but others elsewhere in the Mediterranean and one as far as modern Iran.

Geographic distribution of hoards with coins from Sicily

Similarly, maps for dynasties now include points for hoards associated to rulers through their relationship to dynasty URIs with org:memberOf.

Distribution of the Seleucid Dynasty before update

Seleucid Dynasty after update

One other minor update was to enable the display of findspots and hoards on the map for collections. As you can see, the American Numismatic Society has fairly good coverage within Greek coin hoards.

Mints and hoards associated with the ANS collection

Updates to Associated Types in Nomisma

For quite a few years (going back to about 2016), the concept pages for many types of IDs in Nomisma.org have shown a table of example types related to the given concept, with photographs of related specimens related to the type, if available. This table was limited to 10 results, but the entire type listing could be downloaded as a CSV file.

After a minor overhaul, I have implemented pagination of these types as well as sorting for the columns of authority, mint, denomination, and date (by earliest date of issue). This enhances the overall usability of the feature.

Examples of staters, ordered alphabetically by authority

 

In addition, I updated the underlying SPARQL queries for deities defined in Nomisma to display both maps depicting the geographic distribution (mints, hoards, and individual findspots) and related types. The metrical and distribution analysis charts are now available for deity concepts, so it is possible to generate a chart showing the distribution of Hellenistic kings that issued coinage of Zeus, for example.

Distribution of rulers that issued types of Zeus