News from Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE)

From the DIGITALCLASSICIST list

 Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) has seen significant progress in the last six months:

1. All types through Pupienus have been added (OCRE contains nearly 20,000 Roman imperial coin types)
2. More than 25,000 individual physical specimens have been linked to these types from four different collections, including the American Numismatic Society (12,997 coins) and the British Museum (11,566 coins). We expect to incorporate data from major archaeological databases, such as the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the European Coin Find Network, in the future.
3. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the project $300,000 for three years to fund the completion of the project, including the full photography of the ANS' Roman imperial collection.

We're interested in expanding the base of data contributors. The greater number of coins linked to OCRE-defined coin types, the more accurate the quantitative and geographic analyses become. Please see here for documentation on how to contribute data to OCRE and other numismatic linked data projects (a joint ANS-British Museum project based on Michael Crawford's Roman Republican Coinage (1974) corpus will launch within a few months).

Ethan Gruber
American Numismatic Society

And from Numishare

Thursday, June 5, 2014

OCRE updates: coin types through Pupienus added

There are a few significant updates to report with OCRE (Online Coins of the Roman Empire). First, we have added all of the coin types through Pupienus (A.D. 238). There are now more than 19,000 Roman imperial coin types represented in OCRE. I have also generated new RDF dumps from both the ANS and British Museum collections, so we now have physical specimens (including images in some cases) for these new types. The last update from the ANS is from Septimius Severus, I believe, so we added thousands more physical coins into the nomisma.org triplestore that power's OCRE's linking. There are about 25,000 physical objects linked to types defined on OCRE. The new Contributors page is a dynamic representation of collections that have submitted data into the triplestore. The University of Virginia collection has been updated to link a few coins of Severus Alexander and Maximinus Thrax into OCRE. Two of these are from the Oliver's Orchard Hoards, a large hoard excavated in Britain in the 1980s. About half of UVA's collection comes from this hoard, and so there will be more georeferenced coins added into the system eventually, as we make our way through the Crisis of the Third Century. As such, the two coins of Severus Alexander from this hoard, published in the UVA collection, are the first two physical objects available in OCRE that have attested findspots.
Importantly, OCRE has been migrated to the newest version of Numishare. OCRE is functionally the same as before, but the query process for displaying thumbnails on search results pages is more efficient. Pages will load slightly faster while browsing the collection. This migration also means that the new version of the project uses the Bootstrap framework, which means that the site is responsive, functionally equally as well on mobile devices as on desktop ones.

 

Posted by Ethan Gruber at 8:57 AM