Abstract
The digital history case study focuses on the Hoard Analysis Research Project, a sub-project of the CRESCAT initiative. When the CRESCAT-HARP project began, it was faced with legacy data in print and digital formats that required considerable attention to be useable in a study of coin circulation. HARP leveraged the OCHRE data model to atomize and organize the data into individually identifiable items—hoards, hoard items, coin groups, and coins—contextualized in space and time. The project borrowed from existing taxonomic metadata properties and created customized variables and values where necessary—the data landing soundly in an ultimately rigorous and intuitive representation within the OCHRE platform, becoming available for meaningful, quantitative analysis and publication. While HARP was a narrowly focused project, it involved experts from a wide variety of backgrounds, from Classics to modern monetary theory to data analytics and computing. The OCHRE Data Service played a major role in advising on data management and in performing much of the data curation, integration, and publication, helping to bring this data set to life.
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Notes
- 1.
See Stager (1991). The hoard was found in Grid 57, Square 68, Room 341 in “a small pit cut into the floor” (MC 31620). Ashkelon 1, p. 322.
- 2.
CRESCAT: A Computational Research Ecosystem for Scientific Collaboration on Ancient Topics began in September 2015 with generous support from a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Award 145,045. UChicago archaeologist, David Schloen, was the PI; Walter Shandruk (PhD ‘16, Classics UChicago) was the postdoctoral researcher; Bresson, now retired, is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Classics, History, the Oriental Institute, and the College (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1450455).
- 3.
See Royal Numismatic Society of Great Britain (1981).
- 4.
http://coinhoards.org. The CRESCAT-HARP team would like to thank and acknowledge the collaborative efforts of Dr. Peter van Alfen and Ethan Gruber from the American Numismatic Society.
- 5.
This Substitution feature was implemented with the blessing of Francois Velde, economic advisor to the CRESCAT project. It was he who provided the term “Imputed value” in affirmation of the strategy during discussion at the CRESCAT Workshop, March 2017, in Chicago. The ANS Coin Hoards website acknowledges the incompleteness and uncertainty of the record (http://coinhoards.org/pages/about), but does not attempt to account for qualitative descriptions like “a few” or “a great many.” Hence, in their analysis (with “uncertain” counting as 1), the total count of IGCH 0010 comes to “86–87 coins” (http://coinhoards.org/id/igch0010), whereas with specific quantities imputed to “a few” and “a great many,” our total comes to 129 coins. In both cases, caution and transparency are needed in any analysis.
- 6.
See the Tell Keisan case study (Chap. 10) for more information about Map View.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
“Gephi is the leading visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Gephi is open-source and free” https://gephi.org/.
- 11.
We also cleaned out items where mints were missing or where values were blank or zero, since blank or zero weights are not allowed in Gephi.
- 12.
As stated on the ANS Nomisma website: https://nomisma.org/.
- 13.
See Chap. 9 for another example of using a SPARQL query with OCHRE.
- 14.
“Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research” https://www.zotero.org/.
- 15.
With thanks to Sharon A. Taylor of Pittsburgh, PA, a retired librarian.
- 16.
See Chap. 9 for a discussion of how HARP data is exported from OCHRE for analysis using R.
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Schloen, S.R., Prosser, M.C. (2023). Digital History Case Study: Greek Coin Hoards. In: Database Computing for Scholarly Research. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46696-0_12
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