Nomisma pages for organizations list members

I have made a small update to the Nomisma.org interface for corporate bodies that will display a list of member people and organizations (and their roles, and start/end date(s), when available). This has been on my agenda for awhile, and makes it easier to drill down from broader political entities, such as the Seleucid Empire, down into individual authorities and issuers, organized chronologically.

Kings and provinces of the Seleucid Empire.

I actually wrote this SPARQL query in the Nomisma framework perhaps a year ago, but never built the underlying pipelines to activate an API URL that executes the query and transforms it into HTML for the Nomisma UI. It only took me a couple of hours this morning to wrap this up. 

The list of entities can be downloaded as CSV. Coverage of the Greek world is quite good, owing to the work we've done to create people and organizations for the publication of the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards in the Hellenistic Royal Coinages project.

We have an outstanding spreadsheet of Roman emperors to be re-ingested into Nomisma, linking them to dynasties and corporate entities. I hope that we will publish these updates soon.

First Smithsonian medal added to Art of Devastation

I happened upon the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection database of medals earlier and came across a World War I medal that I thought might be in the American Numismatic Society's Art of Devastation project, and sure enough I was able to locate this French Heroes Fund medal from the Medallic Art Company (the archival materials and a large number of objects from which the ANS acquired at auction a few years ago and will catalog/publish online, by the way).

I was able to create a Nomisma URI for the SAAM and generate a bit of RDF for this medal, linking it to IIIF images hosted by the Smithsonian. There are almost certainly more WWI medals from the SAAM that we might later integrate into the Nomisma.org linked open data cloud.

SAAM 1965.16.63

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

Winterthur joins Nomisma.org

The Münzkabinett Winterthur is the most recent institution to join the Nomisma.org consortium, through their collaboration with the NUMiD framework of German numismatic databases spearheaded by the MK Berlin.

One of the largest collections in Switzerland, it is just getting underway in its digitization program, with about 250 coins cataloged and photographed in its online database. Of these, 20 have been linked to existing Nomisma-affiliated Linked Open Data projects, such as Online Coins of the Roman Empire, Hellenistic Royal Coinages, and Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards.

Winterthur coins in IGCH 1419, found in Cappadocia.

Winterthur G 5677, linked to a Ptolemaic type from Alexander

We expect that more of Winterthur's coins will be integrated into these research portals as cataloging continues over the years.

Furthermore, Winterthur will be one of the major contributors to OSCAR, the type corpus of Swiss coinage from all periods. Specimens will be integrated into OSCAR from several collections in the coming months.

Consolidated GeoJSON for Nomisma concepts

For many years, maps on Nomisma.org have shown a map for many types of numismatic concepts. At first, this map was restricted only to showing a single point for a mint, and the eventual adoption of a SPARQL endpoint and aggregation of typological, hoard, and find data enabled the query and display of many types of geographic features associated with a wider variety of concepts. Associated mints, hoards, and individual findspots were requested by Leaflet in three different API calls, and this created some limitations in applying variable styling based on density of distribution after AJAX loading completed while simultaneously binding the layers together in a group to zoom to the full map bounds, since the three API calls may take different amounts of time to respond.

After a few days of work, I have implemented a new singular GeoJSON response that can be accessed via content negotiation for the "application/vnd.geo+json" content type or appending ".geojson" to the concept URI. This singular GeoJSON response is easier to manipulate further after loading, and now both the mints and finds layer display differently sized circles based on the density of objects or types produced or found at a particular geographic location. This makes it much easier to spot the mints that produced the largest volume of coinage for a particular ruler, denomination, etc. The map below illustrates the distribution of mints that produced coinage of Alexander the Great as authority, stated authority, or portrait (the numbers are based on the number of types, not specimens), with Amphipolis and Pella as the mints producing the largest number, unsurprisingly.

Map of Alexander the Great