HELLENISTIC ROYAL COINAGES PROJECT GRANT

We are thrilled to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the American Numismatic Society (ANS) a substantial grant of $262,000 to fund the web-based Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC) project. Under the direction of Curator Dr. Peter van Alfen and Director of Data Science Ethan Gruber, this three-year project (Phase 1, planned for 2017–­2020) promises to radically transform the ability of students, scholars, or collectors to identify and research Hellenistic royal coinages, and to incorporate this numismatic material into broad analyses of political, economic, and social history. The funds from this grant will be used solely to hire assistants to aid in the extensive photography, cataloguing, and typology work that lies at the heart of the project.

HRC will be built around seven interlinked components, employing the principles of Linked Open Data, already successfully deployed in a number of other ANS projects (including the NEH-­funded Online Coins of the Roman Empire). These include three stand­alone online tools each of which is devoted to the coinage of a single royal dynasty. These are: (1) PELLA, with a focus on the Argeads of Macedonia including Alexander the Great; (2) Seleucid Coins Online (SCO); and (3) Ptolemaic Coins Online (PCO). Incorporated within these three tools will be (4) a monogram and symbols repository. Two additional stand­alone tools, (5) Greek Coin Hoards and (6) the scanned Newell notebooks, will provide full documentation of available hoard evidence and provenance information for many individual coins. While all of the stand­alone tools will be interlinked, they will also be united through a portal site, (7) Hellenistic Royal Coinages, that will serve as a union catalogue for global searches and as a platform for later expansion, which will focus on adding the coinages of the remaining Hellenistic dynasties (Phase 2, post­-2020).

To read the complete article, see:
THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES FUNDS THE ANS’S HELLENISTIC ROYAL COINAGES PROJECT (http://numismatics.org/pocketchange/neh-hrc/)

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