ANS Latin American department updated in Mantis

Thanks to the hard work of Sami Norling, our contract data cleanup specialist, the Latin American department at the American Numismatic Society has been migrated from our 20 year old FileMaker Pro database to CollectiveAccess. The department consists of 32,000 objects, more than 29,000 of which are publicly accessible on Mantis. The data normalization process has significantly improved the consistency and quality of the department, with the majority of place names linked to Geonames.org URIs, making it possible to plot production places and a limited number of findspots on the Leaflet-based map interfaces. A significant number of people, corporate bodies, and dynasties have been linked to Wikidata.org, enabling the standardizing of names internally within the department and with similar objects in other departments (for example, there is substantial overlap in artists, issuers, and authorities from Medals and Decorations).

 

A map showing the distribution of production places and findspots of the Latin American department.

Students, scholars, and collectors of the coinage of Central, South America, and the Caribbean will find these improvements extremely useful. The integration of Geonames and, particularly, Wikidata will enable us to build the next generation of query and visualization features in Mantis once we complete the database migration process. The last remaining departments are East Asian, Medieval, and Modern European.

Harvard Art Museums added to BIGR

Thanks to the work of Simon Glenn (Ashmolean Musem, Oxford) and Laure Marest (Harvard Art Museums), 19 coins from Harvard Art Museums have been added to the Bactrian and Indo-Greek Rulers (BIGR) project. HAM is the 10th contributor to the project, which now contains links to more than 5,700 specimens.

A Harvard coin depicted at Euthydemus I 2.15

A spreadsheet of Harvard -> BIGR URI concordances and some basic metadata allowed me to load the spreadsheet into OpenRefine in order to extract the IIIF image and manifest URIs and export the resulting data directly into Nomisma-compliant RDF using a template. This is a departure from earlier iterations of the workflow which necessitated writing a PHP script to harvest data from the API and attempt to automate the matching of type references to URIs.

New Nomisma project partners are increasingly creating their own RDF/XML exports for ingestion into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint or providing spreadsheets already embedded with coin type URIs, enabling a more seamless transformation into RDF through minor OpenRefine cleanup and template exports. Writing scripts to harvest and parse human-written references into URIs is increasingly a process of the past, although this is still necessary for one of Nomisma's largest contributors.