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.