Flipping a Coin: Building a Numismatic Database with Undergraduate Researchers, by Julie Langford
By Ellen Bauerle | August 1, 2014
That sinking feeling when you realize you’ve completely underestimated the scope of a project? I’m far more familiar with it than I’d like to admit.
It was what I felt when I began analyzing the data I gathered in the library and vaults of the American Numismatic Society on provincial coinage minted under the Severan dynasty. I’d received a grant from my home institution to place the images and legends on provincial coinage in conversation with that of imperial coinage. I thought by doing so, I could bring to life the negotiations of ideology between local concerns and imperial propaganda.
It was a good idea, an exciting new methodology. What I failed to realize is the quantity of data I had to consider in analyzing provincial and imperial coinage. My philologically focused graduate school training had not prepared me for this—in order to analyze the relationships in any systematic way I would need to keep an impossibly large body of data in my head.