Numismatics, computers and the Internet: Draft for INC A Survey of Numismatic Research“ 2015 volume

Since the publication of the last survey authored by Wigg-Wolf in 2009, the digital landscape for numismatics has changed perhaps even more rapidly than he or indeed many had imagined. This survey attempts to provide an overview and not an exhaustive documentation of numismatics on the Internet, it is perhaps biased by the native tongue of the author, but the advent of powerful translation tools such as Google Translate has made the process easier. Without doubt, some sites, applications and resources will have been missed and the author accepts responsibility.

In recent years, advances within the computing and Internet domains have been manifold and this survey will attempt to demonstrate this. The Internet and its associated technologies provides an affordable (with costs for storage and infrastructure decreasing annually as projects leverage cloud computing) and relatively easy medium via which the dissemination and publication of numismatics knowledge can be expedited. During the intervening period between this survey and the next, one imagines the pace of change will have accelerated even further and numismatics, one hopes will have progressed dramatically.

However, as the previous surveyor sagely wrote:

“…Not only will technology and applications have moved on, above all websites will have closed down or moved and links (will) no longer be active”. (Wigg-Wolf 2009: 720)

Building on prior INC survey work, the largest sections had traditionally been dedicated to databases in the traditional sense; projects that fail to place their datasets online are now rare thankfully and there is an emphasis on open licenses and aggregated data, which within the last survey was a desire and is now a reality. Back in 2009, Wigg-Wolf applied a very simple model of searching the web to show the explosion of web term search results for selected key words and this has been reapplied in table 1 below. Surprisingly the factor of increase is equal, but this previously applied model does not account for Google algorithmic changes.

Year	Term: numismatics	% Increase	Term: coin and computer	% Increase
2002	-	-	249,000	-
2008	1,450,000	-	16,700,000	671
2013	8,530,000	5.8	97,100,000	5.8

Table 1: Increase in results for basic search terms

However, such as been the change in the phenomenology of web landscape, part of this review will be dedicated to the participatory/ social web, referred to in the last survey mainly as ‘web 2.0’. This survey will also look at developments in the Semantic web domain, the development of recording standards and collaborative vis-à-vis computing projects, the cautious integration of Wikipedia sourced data and also at the development of other computing techniques, which have been applied to numismatics during the 2008 – 2013 timeframe.

The Participatory Numismatic paradigm

The evolving landscape of the Internet, is now allowing numismatists to encounter the multi-vocality of the layman in greater volumes and outside of the deep and protected web of ‘members-only’ resources. A scholar in New York can now easily interact with a collector in Perth, Australia in real time conversations using technology such as Skype or Google Hangouts with access to rich and varied resources including high definition imagery, 3D models and video. The traditional expensive print volume in numismatics and in most humanities and science fields is now facing extinction. Does the traditional dissemination method still have a place in the numismatic digital age?

Huge quantities of numismatic information can now be accessed, downloaded, manipulated, compared and utilized at the click of a button or for those with the digital knowledge to harness sophisticated programming skills to repurpose completely. Many different models can be applied to the way the web is moving. Is it a democracy? Is it a Marxist model? The knowledge rich are still the ones in the driving seat (Richardson 2013) and this is where numismatists and those within the trade can excel.

Of course, as noted by many in different sectors to numismatics, this sheer volume of information and the multi-vocal presentation of data can lead to problems, which are now grander in scale to those scholars were traditionally faced with, when separating the proverbial ‘wheat from the chaff’ from physical media.

Discussion boards, forums and virtual groups

As noted in the previous survey, the advent of the participatory model of engagement and interaction within the digital realm initiated the creation of huge numbers of numismatic forums and virtual communities (for example Moneta-L As also previously noted, most of these communities are numismatic trade related and very few could be classified as strictly academic, but their potential as a knowledge base is immense.

However, it could be said that these platforms are now slowly withering away as the multiplicity of choice erodes their former position. Organizations and individuals can now easily install their own discussion board software (for example PHPBB) and moderate discussions behind pay walls or closed memberships. Undoubtedly, there are resources to which the author and others are not privy and these are discounted in this survey.

In table 2, an attempt is made to demonstrate the demise of the Moneta-L message volume:

Year	Average messages per month
2013	75
2012	191
2011	352
2010	270
2009	328
2008	361
2007	380
2006	520
2005	754
2004	833
2003	994
2002	1001

Table 2: Comparative quantities by year of messages sent to the Moneta-L community.

As in the prior survey, a cursory search of Yahoo suggests (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/search?query=coins - note change in URL structure from previous surveys) that the quantity of discussion groups has dropped from the 2008 figure of 3,990 to 2,377 groups. A search for the more specialized term of numismatics gives a figure of 80 such groups (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/search?query=numismatics). Within Google’s alternative to Yahoo’s systems, 763 groups exist for coin (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forumsearch/coins) and 62 for numismatics (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forumsearch/numismatics).

In 2009, the last survey cited several specialist Yahoo groups; most of these have changed URL since then and are quite often dormant. For example:

• Ancient and Medieval Coins (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ancientandmedievalcoins) last posted to in July 2013.
• Roman Provincial Coins – now obsolete.
• Coins Roman (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CoinsRoman/) less than 40 posts in 2013.

This might be symptomatic of the demise of Yahoo as a web powerhouse; but these forums seem to be falling off the edge of the world.

Conversely, the amateur/trade generated informational seems to be as strong (or even stronger) as previously stated. In the last survey some resources stated appear to have fallen into disrepair, but others have stepped into the breach.

For Celtic coins, the trade site for Chris Rudd (and indeed his accompanying traditional publication) is well represented and cited in mailing lists and publications (http://www.celticcoins.com/) with a good archive of his coin of the week; http://kernunnos.com/ is still maintained and is now under a Creative Commons license. The mirror of Oxford University’s Celtic Coin Index (currently hosted by the Portable Antiquities Scheme http://finds.org.uk/cci¹) which is housed at http://www.celticcoins.ca/ does not appear to have been updated for several years and http://www.celtic-coin-agora.com/ seems to be stuck in the age of Yahoo’s GeoCities web design ethos which closed in 2009 (indeed this seems to be indicative of many numismatic Internet resources.)

For Islamic coins, amateur site seem to be less apparent, for example http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Coins/, although this, as for many of the amateur sites does not appear to have been updated frequently whilst there is also http://islamiccoins.ancients.info/. Many of the previous resources cited in 2009 no longer exist as the web churn has dispensed with their footprint. The trade community is still driving some of the strongest resource sites with many previously cited exemplars still prominent; for example Wildwinds (http://www.wildwinds.com which was re-launched in 2009 and cites impressive traffic volumes on its home page) and Coin Archives (http://www.coinarchives.com). These resources are still at the forefront, though an aesthetic overhaul and use of some of the latest search technology would do wonders for their presentation and ease of use. Another notable site in this panoply is the Coin Project resource (http://coinproject.com), which has not achieved the same critical mass as the prior citations. There is also Tantalus coins (http://www.tantaluscoins.com), which follows the same site design principles as many of the dealer/trade based resources and could perhaps do with refreshing.

The sheer amount of information within these resources remains an untapped numismatic databank, if they could fall in with the linked data efforts documented below, aggregation and pooling of knowledge would be enormous. Producers of numismatic knowledge were (and indeed are now) faced with consumers who can dictate how and when they want to interact with their research; they have usually lost control of their research once it has been placed within the digital realm as it can be repurposed and fed to the masses in a way that the physical print media never could. Tracking this (mis-)use of academic and other resources is a Sisyphean task and perhaps pointless!

## Identification aids

The amateur and professional numismatist (and indeed archaeologists with no real interest in numismatics), often has need for identification aids. Former reliance on expensive library based resources has now diminished and there is now a reasonable amount of Internet based identification aids. Some periods and numismatic classes are better serviced than others and the below attempts to point out some exemplars.

A wide array of resources exists for the Roman period of various standards. Some of these are online catalogues or research publications such as the British Museum’s publication of Crawford’s Roman Republican Coins (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/online_research_catalogues/roman_republican_coins.aspx) and some are basic guides to Roman coinage enhanced with the use of Linked data (http://finds.org.uk/romancoins). All strive to give the consumer grounding in the numismatic theory and principle and provide a good starting point. The Forum Ancient coins toolkit (http://www.romancoin.info) provides a very wide overview of Roman numismatics; peppered with trade sourced images, and some good tools that help their users search for legends, which could be enhanced by some user testing and refreshing (as noted in the previous survey other sites provide similar tools.) As Wigg-Wolf noted (2009: 722), there are dedicated sites for Countermarks (http://www.romancoins.info/Countermarks.html), sites dedicated to copies, forgeries and imitations and perhaps too many others to mention.

In reality, these toolkits and aids have not moved on too much since 2009. The biggest improvement in this sector will be forthcoming with the American Numismatics Society’s forthcoming projects such as Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE: http://numismatics.org/ocre/), which will use sophisticated linked data tools to provide a fantastic and discipline leading tool.

In the Medieval field appears to have less identification aids available for assisting the scholar and the amateur; is this reflective of complexity? The PAS again provides a coin guide for the 3 medieval periods with which it deals (see http://finds.org.uk/medievalcoins for one period example); however the resources are aimed primarily at the types of numismatics that are typically found within England and Wales. These pages are enhanced by the same methods as described for the Roman period above.

Blogging and self-publication

The web log, or ‘blog’ for short, has taken a fall from its lofty position that it held within the last survey. The blogging practitioner has to have time to invest in the creation of quality content and to be able to curate official and user generated content. It is now extremely easy to create a blog; a panoply of services exist – Google’s Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), Wordpress (http://wordpress.com) hosted blogs, micro-blogging via Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/) and you can install your own if you so wish (for example the code from http://wordpress.org.) However, this publishing platform does allow for polemic to be delivered from a virtual soapbox, with no editorial control.

Blogs are now, slightly on the wane, as social media diverges towards the shorter form of Twitter and other sharing services, but there are still various high quality resources that the numismatist and researcher can access. For two good examples, ‘Numismatics and Archaeology’² run by Nathan Elkins, ‘Coins at Warwick’³ and for the collector there are a wide variety of sites of variable quality.

Many in the sector have been subjected to vitriolic postings from some bloggers, with their methods, ethics and characters called into question (this will not be entered into here). A wise cliché that should be heeded within all social and participatory models is ‘do not feed the troll’ and that is something that many in numismatics and humanities could do with following.

The rise of the micro-blogging platform Twitter (http://twitter.com) and the Facebook (http://facebook.com) network for example, have created a new participatory method for numismatists to generate dialogue amongst themselves and with non-specialists. As these platforms have evolved, users have been able to share high-quality images, links and knowledge easily with a ‘tribe’ of followers.

A simple search on the Twitter platform with focus applied to users (https://twitter.com/search?q=numismatics&src=typd&mode=users) reveals a wide array of people who mention numismatics within their profile or biographical details. These individuals and groups are frequently traders and collectors, who share information about auctions and items from their collection, but there are also ‘digital’ numismatists and academics that disseminate traditional academic knowledge through this platform (Pett, 2012).

Facebook also provides a rich interface for the dissemination of numismatic resources. Societies, traders, individuals and academics can easily build on existing networks and use a fully-fledged participatory platform to build a community. A couple of exemplars for numismatic Facebook participation are the American Numismatic Society (https://www.facebook.com/AmericanNumismaticSociety) and the Money and Medals Network (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Money-and-Medals-Network/).

Both of these resources have tried to produce thoughtful, engaging and educational numismatic content, which may or may not be consumed by a non-numismatic audience. A benefit of this system is the ability to devolve administration amongst several members, comments can be moderated and community building can easily be facilitated without too much work. Of course, the organization is a marionette for the masters of these social platforms, who can withdraw services at short notice or close at short notice.

However, it must be remembered, that these platforms fuel the digital divide; not everyone is there, it could be said that those with a high degree of technological capital are making it their playground and perhaps bypassing large parts of the community that consciously or sub-consciously decide not to participate (Richardson 2013.) However, if your organization chooses not to participate in these platforms, perhaps it is missing a cheap and viable opportunity for publicity. Serendipity can be a wonderful thing for numismatics and social media provides a great avenue for this to happen.

Image Sharing

Other platforms that numismatics are disseminated by include Yahoo’s Flickr which has been used to great effect by several organizations, for example the Portable Antiquities Scheme uses it for deploying images of exciting numismatic discoveries such as the Frome hoard from Somerset (https://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/sets/72157624319051565/) and the Hackney hoard (https://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/sets/72157625064391533/). The Scheme had also used the Flickr system for dissemination of the Staffordshire Anglo-Saxon hoard in 2009 with over 250,000 people viewing the images in one day, demonstrating the potential of the system.

Private individuals and collectors can and do use this platform for disseminating information about their collections or for the generation of large pools of images relating to coin types or individuals (see for example the pool dedicated to Emperor Gaius Caligula (https://www.flickr.com/groups/395282@N21/pool) or Joe Geranio’s pool of images for the Julio-Claudians (https://www.flickr.com/photos/julio-claudians/). The Flickr interface also provides a strong application-programming interface (API), via which images can be retrieved and reused on third party websites. A good example of this practice can be seen on the Nomisma portal (http://nomisma.org/flickr), where photographs on Flickr have been given the appropriate metadata tags to enable their discovery. When organizations and individuals have chosen to make their content available under a liberal license, for example under a Creative Commons variation (http://creativecommons.org) their reuse by third parties can drive people to consume content on the originator’s domain and their reach can be particularly extended. If this platform manages to remain in the web ecology, it could feasibly provide a rich resource for numismatic discovery and evangelism. A model that numismatic projects could emulate is the Pleiades project (http://pleiades.stoa.org) and their attempt to incorporate images from Flickr into their interfaces based around machine tags (see Gillies 2011 for discussion of this.)

Communication tools

Social media platforms also encompass audio-visual networking sites; Skype and Google Hangouts have created a forum space for scholars to present remotely at conferences overseas, to converse during the management of projects and to enable wide scale collaboration. During this survey process, only a couple of examples can be seen and none published fully. The British Museum’s department of Learning, Volunteers and Audiences, has been piloting a video-conferencing session based around the discovery of the aforementioned Frome Hoard (see unpublished conference presentation by Kelland 2014). I believe that these communication tools are fundamental to fostering greater collaboration in the field of numismatics.

Numismatics on the mobile-device

As web technology has progressed, and the trend accelerates towards consumption of Internet resources via the use of mobile devices (tablets, telephones, digital assistants etc.), it has become imperative to make resources available in a consumable format. Within the last survey, Wigg-Wolf commented:

“It has many novel features, even including a facility to view the collection on an iPhone” (2009:723)

This novelty is no longer true, it is a reality. The solution to this is now becoming easier to deploy as software and device responsive presentation frameworks are now being developed for use in building web resources. For instance, several sites, which have been mentioned previously within this document, have made use of the Bootstrap framework (Cascading Style Sheets or CSS and JavaScript combined to provide standardized interfaces and layouts) to good effect – see for example the Portable Antiquities Scheme and NumiShare instances. (Web sites providing full functionality on mobile should become the norm, rather than the exception by the time of the next survey.)

Mobile also provides the opportunity for delivering numismatics via ‘apps’ or applications running as individual programmes on consumers devices (either native to the operating system or as HTML5). This provides a platform for numismatists (ironically) to monetize their discipline; consumers are prepared to pay small fees for access to apps. This may explain why there are very few at the time of writing. For the Android operating system, apps include the Numismatist magazine (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.numis.numismatist) and NumisBase (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.apps.numisbase) which are free at the time of writing, and for Apple’s iOS an example is Numisma which is a paid for application (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/numisma/id413534908?mt=8) allowing users to upload their collection into the container for querying. In the future, we may see mobile device based applications that may facilitate tasks such as automatic recognition of coins, die analysis, comparative analysis and interfaces with other database via the use of the native functions of the device.

Cryptocurrency

During the period of this survey, ‘Crypto currency’ has become a phenomenon that is gaining traction. There are now several players in this arena: BitCoin (2009 saw this currency’s introduction; see Bohr & Bashir 2014 ), Litecoin, Namecoin , Robocoin and Peercoin for instance. As this field is changing rapidly, the Wikipedia page dedicated to Crypto currency is a very useful resource to consult: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency. Discussing the technicalities of this form of numismatics is outside the scope of this survey, but will provide much research material in years to come.

Databases

Whilst there is a trend towards aggregated, linked massive online resources (especially in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector), the relational database is not likely to disappear from the numismatic armory within the foreseeable future. Recording numismatics is essentially a very simple concept, with set terminologies and conventions that lend themselves easily to computer scientists, archaeologists and numismatists to easily generate large digital repositories of data. As technology has rapidly progressed, the numismatic community has been quick to publish their databases on the web; the old model of offline, analogue only is hopefully becoming a thing of the past and the use of software such as Access and FileMaker is not as widespread.

Open source relational databases, such as MySQL or PostGres coupled to web frameworks are now becoming more common. Ideally, data capture will move towards online standardized interfaces without the need for installation of complex software, with information available instantly; for example following the model of the Portable Antiquities Scheme or systems such as the archaeological project ArkDB⁴ from LP Archaeology or the Getty funded ARCHES⁵ project (the latter two are not geared towards numismatics). There does not need to be a time-lag between data entry and web publication, academics, volunteers and professionals can now work anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. They do not need to be tied to desktop software.

Since the last survey, open source software has become a significant weapon for the ‘digital’ numismatist to employ; software and tools are now available to use for creation of numismatic resources. For instance, one could use all, or aspects of Gruber’s Numishare software platform (https://github.com/ewg118/numishare and http://numishare.blogspot.com), the source code behind the Portable Antiquities Scheme site (https://github.com/findsorguk/findsorguk) and the infrastructure that runs Nomisma (https://github.com/nomisma).

A team could harness software such as Apache Solr⁶ or Elastic Search⁷ to index enormous databases and efficiently serve up faceted search results; XSLT⁸ can be used to manipulate XML documents simply and quickly to generate data in different formats

However, this still does not prevent reinvention of the wheel! Regularly at conferences, delegates talk about the creation of new databases without reference to existing ontologies or controlled vocabularies and with disregard to open source models they could adapt or reuse. There are however a variety of exemplar databases that exist, many building on the position from which they were described back in 2009 and have also been discussed elsewhere (Pett 2010 and Bracey 2012).

The efforts of the American Numismatic Society (ANS) are probably still at the forefront, with their Mantis database (http://numismatics.org/search/) providing a benchmark for many to aspire to. Their lead developer, Ethan Gruber is behind the technological implementation of their resources and has also produced several other notable products such as “Online Coins of the Roman Empire” (http://numismatics.org/ocre) and web publication of Kris Lockyear’s “Coin hoards of the Roman Republic” (http://numismatics.org/chrr/). The ANS’ resources provide access to over 1/2 million numismatic objects, stable, cool URIs and with liberal licenses applied, allowing reuse in many other applications. Their model is definitely one to imitate.

Within Greek numismatics, the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum (http://www.sylloge-nummorum-graecorum.org/) is still at the forefront of the field with the traditional old style search interfaces. The site could do with a revamp to bring it in line with the new breed of database that is now becoming the norm, with unified search and third party resources as two such suggestions.

As discussed in the previous survey, other coin cabinets have placed and maintained their collections online; these include Vienna’s Kunsthisorisches Museum (http://bilddatenbank.khm.at/), Münzkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (http://ww2.smb.museum/ikmk/) and the Fitzwilliam Museum⁹ (http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/opac/search/searchcm.html). Some of these do not seem to have moved on significantly since the last survey (it is worth searching the Internet Archive to visualize the changes to interfaces; for example - http://web.archive.org/web/20120312151144/http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/opac/search/searchcm.html).

The British Museum revamped its collection system (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx) during the period of this survey, with new interfaces being added (which are now coming towards their end of life); information is steadily being upgraded from the basic level noted in the previous survey, with many new images being added. However with such a big collection, the task will be ongoing for a long time to come. The biggest innovation from their curatorial and information services teams has been the mapping of these data to the CIDOC-CRM (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/), with a very detailed descriptive RDF representation available for every object within this system. Projects such as Nomisma are now using and consuming data from this system.

Smaller museums and institutions are still placing their collections onto the Internet, with varying degrees of success. Examples include McMaster University’s Bruce Brace coin collection (http://arendt.mcmaster.ca/~coins/), within which 272 coins are displayed, with use of Zoomify¹⁰ (used by some other databases discussed within this text) to enable deep zoom for images, and an interesting visualization of die axes for many coins. Their use of thematic tours is a potentially useful tool, perhaps lacking dynamism, but it is not the norm for other database. Whilst these tools are labor intensive to produce, they will bring in the non-specialist audience. As with many resources, the Princeton University’s collection’s interfaces (http://www.princeton.edu/~rbsc/department/numismatics/browse%20search.html ) do not seem to have moved on since Wigg-Wolf’s previous survey; last modified date for this resource is 2006. The raw material contained within their database, is however of very high quality, with access to high resolution imagery. Staying in the USA, the Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia (http://coins.lib.virginia.edu/) has a collection that bears the stamp of Gruber’s Numishare software and benefits from his touch. Using this interface is easy, intuitive to use and well linked to relevant third party resources.

An interesting statement of intent to develop their database further can be found on Archäologischer Park Carnuntum’s website, where they state their ambition for how their database will develop (http://www.carnuntum.co.at/wissenschaft/forschungsprojekte/muenzprojekt).

The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) (http://finds.org.uk/database) has gone through several iterations during this survey period (all implemented by the author of this survey), and now provides access to over 300,000 numismatic items discovered by the public in England and Wales. The system now not only allows distributed authorship from remote members of staff, but has devolved access to trusted members of the public to record numismatic material, via guided interfaces. Extensive work was expedited by Sam Moorhead, Ian Leins, Eleanor Ghey, John Naylor and builds on the work of others (for example, the Corpus of Early Medieval Coins, Cambridge University) to create the interfaces that should ideally cut down on errors created at the point of data entry (of course, this cannot account for mistaken identification!) The PAS still provides different levels of access to their data, with researchers encouraged to register for enhanced data fields such as spatial data. The PAS database now also includes the data from Peter Guest’s ‘Iron Age and Roman Coinage from Wales’ project (available also on the Archaeological Data Service (ADS) website - http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/iarcw_bcs_2007/ ) and the Celtic Coin Index (not updated with new data since 2004). Surprisingly, the ADS only has 4 sets of data that give numismatics as a keyword for their data, with all of these pre 2009 including the aforementioned Guest and Wells project, the National Museum and Galleries of Wales Collection and an analysis of Roman Silver coins¹¹.

After the PAS, three other large coin find databases can be found at present, Austria’s dMFRÖ (digital coins found in Roman times in Austria), which has changed URL since the last survey to http://www.oeaw.ac.at/antike/index.php?id=358 and like many others needs a serious revamp; the NUMIS database from the Geldmuseum in the Netherlands (400,000 objects) and the German NUMIDAT based in Frankfurt (http://www.fda.adwmainz.de/index.php?id=338).

The Smithsonian (http://amhistory.si.edu/coins/search.cfm) collection still stands at the same levels as noted in prior surveys (1.6million objects - 1.1 million paper objects and 500,000 coins, medals and decorations) has recently introduced a crowdsourcing project, with an emphasis on transcribing American banknotes (see for example: https://transcription.si.edu/browse?filter=owner%3A7&q=browse&showcompleted=1) that has captured the imagination of an audience worldwide as documented by Olsen (2014).

The Roman Provincial Coinage project, Oxford University http://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk, provides a reasonably modern interface for the interrogation of this particular set of coinage. The various ways of interrogating the collaborative dataset and the pop out Greek keyboards are of note, the maps functional, and the layouts are easy to read. Like most projects, the use of linked data and third party resources would turn this resource into a fantastic interface. The site authors or developers could also invest time in rewriting URL structure to produce clean, cool, URIs.

The previously mentioned Corpus of Early Medieval Coins (EMC) - http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/coins/emc/ - does not appear to have developed further since the last period of survey. Interfaces, like many in this sector could do with robust overhaul and integration with external resources to enrich visitor experience. The data contained within is still of utmost important to the study of that period in the UK as a complementary resource to the PAS (see Blackburn 2005 for discussion of the EMC’s contribution and use of OAI-PMH to disseminate data).

Out of these numismatic databases, the PAS and the various implementations of the Numishare system(for example University of Virginia) attempt to incorporate linked data or information from external, third party applications programming interfaces. As mentioned previously, the numismatic community could do with investment in usability studies and applying best practice to make their collections a. engaging, b. accessible, and c. useful!

There seems to be a default template that numismatic databases follow, which could be diverged from, extra resources incorporated and more thematic discovery used. Many of these database collections have changed URL in the last few years. As more institutions adopt best practice and implement stable cool URIs (Sauermann & Cyganaiak 2008), we should see website locations becoming stabilized. During the last survey (Wigg-Wolf 2009: 724), it was noted that the implementation of ‘slippy’ map JavaScript libraries was relatively new. During the intervening period, a few sites have taken these up, but more could do so and indeed make use of interactive timeline technology for visualizing data. A recent addition to the mapping armory for many scholars is the Pelagios ‘Digital Map of the Roman Empire’¹² which can provide a fantastic backdrop on which numismatic data may be re-projected. What would be useful for all these databases, would be a register of research demonstrating what impact these resources have made on the academic world (see for example the PAS section on research¹³.) As databases come and go, a register of these is hard to maintain, but a good starting point can be found on the Money and Medals Network site: http://www.moneyandmedals.org.uk/databases/4571240361

Aggregation and the use of Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web

Since the last survey, the inexorable rise of ‘Linked Data’ principles and the implementation of ‘Semantic Web’ models have been extremely rapid within a small part of the numismatics community. Hardly a numismatic or archaeological computing conference goes by now, without a numismatic linked data paper being entered. The community is now starting to grow, as examples become more readily available. Interoperability (an under used word these days) is now becoming achievable as data architects are now using controlled (multi-lingual) vocabularies to drive their databases, based around stable uniform resources identifiers (URI).

The exemplar in this field is the Nomisma project (http://nomisma.org), which was conceived as a collaborative project, and is now setting the standards for the field of Roman Numismatics and is providing an infrastructure that can be developed and applied to other numismatic fields of study. This project has key stakeholders signed up to participate (the American Numismatic Society (http://numismatics.org), the British Museum (http://britishmuseum.org), the RAI for instance) and is now starting to integrate links to wider resources such as the Getty’s thesauri (http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/) which by the time of publication of this survey will be available as Linked Open Data. The next few years in the lifecycle of this project will define for many scholars how their data are presented online and reduce institutional terminology reinvention which is all too apparent.

Different approaches to aggregation still exist; for example Europeana which ingests data from hundreds of sources via the use of the OAI-PMH protocol (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html), is a massive tool for discovering cultural heritage of Europe. This service is debated regularly as to its worth, but it does show that a common aggregation service can be a starting point for discovering numismatics (see http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=coin&rows=24 for an example search for coins, all with images.) Within Germany, the Internet Portal: Finds of Ancient Coins in Europe (INTERFACE) was delivered (see Lehmann & Varughese 2008) and discussed ontological modeling in depth. Computing supervisor for this project, Karsten Tolle, has now moved on to become one of the principal architects (with Ethan Gruber) of the Nomisma ontological model.

There are of course, other semantic models that can be applied to numismatics. The perennial ‘problem’, the CIDOC-CRM has now been applied successfully to the British Museum’s collection for all object types, and their numismatic sub-collections have been modeled thoroughly as part of a Mellon funded project (see Oldman 2014 for elaboration on the model). However, these data still exist in a virtual silo; a visible degree of separation can be seen between the British Museum’s main collection online (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx) and the semantic site (http://collection.britishmuseum.org). ¹⁴ In the previous survey, Wigg-Wolf (2009:274) discussed at length the COINS project, which has now disappeared from the web (see http://oldwww.prip.tuwien.ac.at/research/completed-projects/coins for a brief overview of what the project explored and Jarrett et al (2012) for more detail.) This project implemented the CIDOC-CRM model, but has left no tangible web legacy to review and a small digital footprint on the search engines.

Both of these models have been frequently discussed on the conference circuit over the last few years, the NEH-ODH funded ‘Linked Ancient World Data Institute’ (LAWDI), held at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) in New York (2012) and at Drew University (2013) demonstrated how central the study of numismatics was to our understanding of the Ancient World. As many delegates said: ‘It all comes back to the money’.

Massive advances have been made since the last survey was written with regards to linking collections, with perhaps the Pelagios (see Simon et al 2014) project and Classics in general showing how effective the production and consumption of linked data is now, and how much potential there is for the future.

As discussed in the previous survey, several other data exchange protocols are still in existence, for example the XML schema used by the Numismatic Data Standard or NUDS (Gruber 2012 & 2013) is still being used and has been significantly enriched since its inception. As in many other computing advances, this again comes from the table of the ANS, a recurrent theme.

Other resources

This category is quite difficult to write and to give full justice to all that is available; it encompasses new projects that are only just beginning to magnificent user generated resources such as Wikipedia. Wikipedia provides access to varying degrees of academic excellence for the study of numismatics and it is a resource that is heavily consumed by ANS and PAS projects; pages of note include the Frome Hoard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frome_Hoard).

Some individuals have also produced fantastic web resources (as mentioned before, they may need some revamping for the new world of the participatory web) with content that must not be ignored. For example the previous survey cited Barclay Head’s ‘Historia Numorum’, which is still going on a stable URL (http://www.snible.org/coins/hn/). In Bracey (2012), a discussion of http://www.zeno.ru - Oriental Coins Database, which has been running since 2002, shows how much content can be generated by volunteers, who pull together academic and auction resources to produce a site of use. In the UK, an independently run detector finds database provides access to over 40,000 coins (http://www.ukdfd.co.uk/ukdfddata/index.php?cat=1), which like the PAS, are of varying quality in the academic sense and the coins recorded. The PAS and the UKDFD are not run by specialist numismatists, but enable the interested professional/amateur, the chance to record coins. The PAS is of course backed up by specialists, who in theory should check every record, but in practice the volume precludes this from happening.

Educational resources on numismatics on the Internet are of variable quality (like all discussed in this document) and range from the Smithsonian’s resources (http://amhistory.si.edu/coins/index.shtml), a huge variety of pages for discovering more about coins at The British Museum’s site (http://www.britishmuseum.org/search_results.aspx?searchText=coins&q=coins and http://www.britishmuseum.org/learning/schools_and_teachers/resources/subjects/financial_education.aspx), and masses more on other websites. There is of course the Ancient Coins for Education website (http://ancientcoinsforeducation.org/) which provides downloadable resources for teachers, Kids Online Resources (http://www.kidsolr.com/history/page6.html) and the United States Mint (http://www.usmint.gov/kids/teachers/library/libraryWebSite.cfm.)

Within the period of this survey, other projects have achieved funding and started data capture for their eventual publication to the web. Two such projects (Oxford University’s OXREP hoards project: Coin hoards of the Roman Empire and the BM/Leicester University collaboration: Crisis or continuity. Hoarding in Iron Age and Roman Britain with special reference to the 3rd century AD) are focused strictly on coin hoarding and make use of Access based recording software developed by Jerome Mairat. These compatible databases will be transferred to the web in the period of the next survey and will no doubt incorporate lessons learnt from Gruber’s work at the ANS and from elsewhere to provide access to large scale data.

As the web mutates, many different resources become available in new forms, enabling lots of potential serendipitous uses of material. Out of print books are now available as electronic versions, if one knows where to look it is quite easy to find the whole of Roman Imperial Coinage as PDFs. Of course, the consumption of these darker resources is at the mercy of laws within the consumer’s country! For more legal access, one can access huge volumes of numismatic research via Google Books¹⁵ with several hundred thousand results available at the time of writing. There are also Numismatics powered resources, such as the Numismatic Bibliomania Society (http://www.coinbooks.org/), Perseus Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/), the ANS library (http://donum.numismatics.org/), and many , many more that cannot be audited here due to space.

Applications of computing technology to Numismatics

There have been some innovative applications of computing towards advancing knowledge in the discipline. An excellent example can be taken from Southampton University’s use of computer tomography to analyze the Selby Coin hoard (see Miles 2012, Cox & Miles 2012), a Roman coin hoard reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (Collins & Ghey, 2010 and Ghey 2012).

Advanced image recognition tools are now attempting to be used for the automatic recognition of various aspects of numismatic research, an interesting paper (Zambanini et al 2008) discusses the potential of Computer Vision, which as yet remains to be fulfilled.

Conclusion

Hopefully this survey of numismatics on the Internet has shown that the discipline is in a very good position for maintaining a profile on the information superhighway. Without doubt, resources, websites and truly excellent efforts have been omitted from this document.

The recent meetings of the European Coin Find Network (held in Carnuntum, Austria and Basel, Switzerland) have been extremely positive and shown a great appetite for the numismatic community to work together. The prolific output of Ethan Gruber at the ANS provides the basis for emulation worldwide and the development of the Nomisma ontological model will stimulate further growth in the ‘digital’ numismatics field. The discipline has access to high quality data in abundance, it now needs to turn these data into interesting, relevant, accessible and stimulating resources and update far more frequently!

One thing that is sadly missing is a project to emulate Cambridge University’s ‘Personal Histories Project’¹⁶ (see Carpeneti 2012); numismatics could do with a digital record of the academics and amateurs who know so much. Maybe this will become a reality during the next survey period. The principles of “open science”¹⁷ and reproducible research will also become very influential during the next survey period; open access, open data, and open source will become three central pillars that will provide the foundation for the digital numismatist.

All links in this paper will be curated on Delicious (for as long as that service is maintained) at: https://delicious.com/dejp3/numismaticsSurvey

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Footnotes