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Author Topic: How to broadly communicate new discoveries using MODERN communication methods?  (Read 495 times)

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Offline Kevin P

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Hello everyone,
This is first and foremost a request for ideas and advice focused on how we might best convey new discoveries and insights regarding this hobby we love.  If you have a background in marketing/ communications; if you have experience with or contacts at organizations focused on ancient numismatics (journals, associations, societies, universities, etc); or if you have ideas regarding these topics - I covet your thoughts.

Over the past 5 years, I have spent countless hours studying Byzantine bronze coins.  My initial focus was the anonymous folles, but that has expanded into all bronze coins from Anastasius I to the coinage reform of Alexius I in 1092.  I have made many discoveries and want to communicate them broadly but am at a loss for how to do so in an effective way that doesn’t take too much time. I have considered journal articles and periodicals, but I am a slow writer, and the process is rigorous (my first peer-reviewed numismatic article has been accepted for publication will end up taking more than 1.5 years from submittal to publication). I am much more comfortable speaking, and I know many people today consume content via videos, but I don’t know how to do this in an effective way either. There can also be value throwing things out to the crowd for comment/ consideration (much like the Forum Discussion boards), but then what?  If a great discovery is made or confirmed here, how does that get communicated more broadly? How does it stick?

I want to get this stuff out of my head so it doesn’t get lost. I also feel that how we communicate needs to keep up with the times, so we don’t lose the next generation. I’m afraid how ancient coin information is conveyed has become, well, ancient. 

Ideally, we would have a single source of truth where we could take new discoveries and also find all the latest known types, varieties, etc for every coin in a series that have all been confirmed by an expert.  Given the rapid pace of discovery and change, I believe modern coin guides should be online so they can be 1) updated regularly as new discoveries emerge, 2) accessible from anywhere, and 3) viewed in any language via resources that can translate web pages into any language. 

One example of this is the page on United States Morgan Silver Dollars, called VAM World (VAMs are to Morgan Dollars as varieties are to ancient coins – there is the main type, such as SB 494, and there are varieties, such as MIB 65Da, 65Db, 66D, N66Da and 67D). VAM World provides educational information, lists of VAMs, how to identify each VAM, photos, a discussion board, and a means to have new VAMs considered by an expert and added to the list.

Of course, the time and cost to create this would be tremendous, and I’m not aware of sponsorship available to create something like this.  This is why I am throwing this out to you all for advice.

Here are some examples of content I wish to share:
1.     Bronze coins from the Byzantine Anonymous Era
•   Varieties.  Apparently unpublished varieties of Anonymous Classes A1, A2, B (beyond Zervos), C, D, E, F, H and I plus the signed folles of Romanus IV and Michael VII
•   Relative rarity of all types based on more than 60,000 documented examples from  excavations, museum holdings, private collections, etc.
•   Mints.  Not all types were made in Constantinople. For example, my first scholarly paper proves that Classes E and F were minted exclusively in Thessalonica.
•   Dates of issue.  The dates we today were guesses by scholars based on limited data from the 50’s and 60’s.  Adjustments are needed, especially for Classes B, C, D, E, F, and I.
•   Corrections to the Classes.  DO Classes L, M and N need to be eliminated (not official issues), a new class needs to be added (discovered in Amorium excavations, but several more have come to the market lately), and one class is out of order (probably my next scholarly paper).

2.     Bronze coins from Anastasius I to the Anonymous Era that are apparently unpublished (hundreds):
•   New types
•   New varieties
•   Reginal years
•   Officina
•   Date forms

If you have read this far, thank you.

Thoughts or ideas?

Kevin

Offline Molinari

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Submit to Koinon--our peer review is relatively fast and we publish yearly.  Winter 2023 issue is full but that gives you time to make submissions for winter 2024.

Offline Joe Sermarini

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Please add your papers to NumisWiki.
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Offline Simon

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For Byzantine coins the only sure way is by writing your knowledge down in the hopes that when someone is compiling a new catalog, they see it and include it.
One of the drawbacks of Byzantine collecting is the main catalog used to communicate with is very outdated, Sear Byzantine Coins and their Values. It is a great body or work but it has not been updated in decades.

 The best catalog and most detailed is the DOC series, but they are even doing their updates online now and only pieces they currently own. This series of catalogs did not gain popularity in the hobby because of the original cost of the editions.
 
Other projects such as Labrum and Wildwinds go by Sear numbers. Unfortunately, that is a limitation.  No room to add new finds.

So you are right, we need a place where everything can be considered and added, sadly no place exists that does not use SBCV, that restricts adding new information but for now it is still the most common way for dealers and collectors to communicate.

Your best bet is to write and place the articles with the updated knowledge in as many sources as possible. Numiswiki, Koinon, academia, all coin boards you are a member of. Also tag your article with key words, things that specifically.

My postings and my Forum Gallery come up when I typeTetarteron” in any search engine.

If someone does create a new catalog, I hope the posts made become a resource for the authors of the new catalog.

If you are looking for another way to communicate with other collectors and academics, I do not think the video world or podcasts can replace basic text research, I might be wrong and shortsighted, but I do not at least see myself using these other mediums for serious research.
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=5633 My main collection of Tetartera. Post reform coinage.

Offline Kevin P

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Thank you all for the thoughts and suggestions. 

If others still have suggestions, please do chime in.

Simon - I agree that the most used resources are woefully out of date.  All of them except MIBE Vol I and II were last updated before the internet ageSear was last updated in 1987 (it has had several reprints since then, no updates).  The DO catalogues were updated in 1992 and 1993 for coins up to Nicephorus III and in 1999 for Alexius I and later.  Even the Ratto auction is still referenced (from 1930, nearly 100 years old!).  The most up to date and complete guide we have is MIB Volumes I (2000) and II (2009), which include all DO, Sear, Ratto and other coins - but these cover only the reigns from Anastasius I to the Revolt of the Heraclii.

However, there have been some fantastic works on Byzantine coins since then that are little known and/or hard to find: 1) Marco Anastasi's Monete Bizantine di Silicia (2009, written in Italian), 2) Egidio Ranieri's La Monetazione di Ravenna Antica (2006, written in Italian), and 3) Early Byzantine Copper Coins, Catalogue of an English Collection (free download at www.byzantine-ae.info).  There are MANY types identified in these 3 resources that you can't find in Sear or anywhere else.  In addition, there are some online resources that I use heavily.  I agree that Wildwinds is useful for the beginner. More useful to me is coins.labarum.info as it is photo-heavy, often showing with many examples.  Acsearch.info is awesome for auction coins (many new types are identified in auctions).  Last is the Christov Family Collection of Byzantine Coins, auctioned off in 2009 (http://images.goldbergauctions.com/php/chap_auc.php?site=1&lang=1&sale=55&chapter=6&page=1).

It would be great if we could aggregate all of these in to one place under a universal numbering system that includes info like the reign, mint, and denomination in the number.  I have some draft ideas about this - not yet ready for prime time.


Offline Pekka K

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Offline Simon

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I think the numbering system is key.

Many of the specialized catalogs are of a small time period, they limit the viweing audiance even further. Again we need a catalog that covers the entire history of the empire.

 The Doc catalogs were not updated ( to my knowledge), the Volume IV was first published in 1999. Volume 5 first publication came after that. In each case different authors were used. In DOC IV Hendy broke the trend and included coins that were not in the major museum collections. In fact my DOC 41 coin has not been in any other catalog in over a 100 years.

Sommer has a nice catalog but only available in German and is mostly based off one collection of 4000 coins, i can say from my collecting goals it was not helpful. The prices were ( based in 2010) but too many issues were missing. In fact instread of adding he had less coins listed than Sear. For that catalog to be succesful it needed to be released in multiple laungages. Updated and then reprinted.

One of the first complete catalogs was done by Bates, it was privatly published and used a simple 1,2,3 numbering system. This was 1981 and only 200 copies were made.

As for the many other works in different laungages,  google translate  has broken the laungage barrier, its not always easy and the translation can be difficult to understand in launges like Bulgarian.

One pet peeve i have here at forum is if the poster does not include the Sear number in the key words or even the denomination type it does not come up. It hurts the advantage of using Forum as a reference guide.

So the solution is one place that all coins can be reviewed then added and critical information be included, most basicly size and weight. The only way to do this is have administrators with the specialtity in their time period review each submission and include it as a new type.  That would have to be collectors with a lot of time on their hands. It would be a wondeful project though.

Simon
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=5633 My main collection of Tetartera. Post reform coinage.

Offline Simon

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Bates, notice the warning in the intro.:)
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=5633 My main collection of Tetartera. Post reform coinage.

Offline Simon

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@kevin p , i just your quote

The DO catalogues were updated in 1992 and 1993 for coins up to Nicephorus III

I did not know this. In fact i bought a first edition of volume 3. :(

Simon
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=5633 My main collection of Tetartera. Post reform coinage.

Offline Virgil H

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Lots of great discussion. I posted in the Maps section and Numiswiki an article about the Princeton University's FLAME project (Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy) project. Princeton has a huge Byzantine collection and I would suggest you take a look at what Princeton is doing and perhaps contact Dr. Alan Stahl, who is an expert in Byzantine and early medieval coins and the Curator of Numismatics for their collection. He seems like he would be open to a communication and they invite people to collaborate. His email is astahlATprinceton.edu. He seems like a nice guy.

Virgil

Offline Kevin P

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These are great thoughts and suggestions.  Thank you Pekka, Simon and Virgil!

Regarding translation of books or papers written in other languages, Google has an amazing new feature in their smartphone app.  If you download the Google app and click on the "translate with camera" button just below the search field, you can take photos of pages in books written in other languages and it will translate just the information in another language and write it over the place where the text was found.  I am including a photo I took of a page in the book as translated by Google from Italian. It isn't perfect, but I had no problem figuring out what it was trying to say where it didn't make sense.  It is a powerful resource when studying books written in other languages.

So the solution is one place that all coins can be reviewed then added and critical information be included, most basicly size and weight. The only way to do this is have administrators with the specialtity in their time period review each submission and include it as a new type.  That would have to be collectors with a lot of time on their hands. It would be a wondeful project though.

I couldn't agree more, Simon!

One more thing on the numbering system that needs to be solved is clearly defining what constitutes a brand new type versus a variety of a type.  For example, Sear uses a different number for Sear 75 and 76 that is merely a change from a letter for an officina to a star, but later Sear lumps many varieties into single numbers such as 494, 805 and 810. These varieties seem to me to be more significant than the difference between Sear 75 and 76.  One thought would be to define 3 categories:  type, variety and variant - with clear definitions of what each means.  For example, for Sear 805, one might define it as 2 standing figures obv with M rev.  Within this type, there are 3 varieties based on what the obv figures are holding [both long crosses, akakia and globus cruciber (rare), or both globus crucibers]. Then, there are variants within each variety based on the symbol over the M.  In some cases, there is yet another layer under that (for example, Sear 805 obverses sometimes show the figures with trefoil-topped crowns), which should be addressed.  Regardless of the number of levels needed, it would be wise to make clear distinctions between major type changes versus the more minor design/legend changes and stick with it.

 

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