A Linked Open World:
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The conference is part of the Oxford-Paris Alexander project (OPAL), a joint initiative between the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford funded by the Labex les Passés dans le Présent and the AHRC. OPAL, directed by Dr Frédérique Duyrat and Prof. Andrew Meadows, explores the possibilities offered by Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web to preserve and make available the physical heritage of the coinage issued in the name of Alexander the Great, a unique and transformative phenomenon across an area from the modern Balkans to Afghanistan.
Coins issued by Alexander and in his name after his death exist today in their millions, scattered in collections across the world. But they are also the victim, as small pieces of precious metal, of destruction and looting in their source countries. The OPAL project will make available online a corpus of 3,500 coins of Alexander in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (http://hcr.ashmus.ox.ac.uk) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (http://gallica.bnf.fr) and will contribute the data to the PELLA project of the American Numismatic Society (http://numismatics.org/pella).
The conference will investigate the homogenizing effect of the coinage of Alexander the Great on the economic history of the Mediterranean, the Near East and Central Asia as well as advertising and exploring the value of amalgamated collections. We will look at the new tools created by Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web as well as their technical composition. It will present new research on the coinage of Alexander, much of which made possible by new opportunities afforded by the PELLA tool. And we will conclude by focussing particularly on the legacy of Alexander the Great, from shortly after his death to the present day, and discussing the importance of preserving such transnational heritage and the role in this that projects like OPAL and PELLA can play.
Coins issued by Alexander and in his name after his death exist today in their millions, scattered in collections across the world. But they are also the victim, as small pieces of precious metal, of destruction and looting in their source countries. The OPAL project will make available online a corpus of 3,500 coins of Alexander in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (http://hcr.ashmus.ox.ac.uk) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (http://gallica.bnf.fr) and will contribute the data to the PELLA project of the American Numismatic Society (http://numismatics.org/pella).
The conference will investigate the homogenizing effect of the coinage of Alexander the Great on the economic history of the Mediterranean, the Near East and Central Asia as well as advertising and exploring the value of amalgamated collections. We will look at the new tools created by Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web as well as their technical composition. It will present new research on the coinage of Alexander, much of which made possible by new opportunities afforded by the PELLA tool. And we will conclude by focussing particularly on the legacy of Alexander the Great, from shortly after his death to the present day, and discussing the importance of preserving such transnational heritage and the role in this that projects like OPAL and PELLA can play.
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Programme
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Monday 3rd April
10.00 Registration 10.15 Introduction (Frédérique Duyrat & Andrew Meadows) Part 1: New tools 10.30 Equality and Concept: Broadening the Scope of Linked Open Data (Sebastian Heath) 11.00 ANS Digital Projects: A Comprehensive Platform for the Study of Numismatics (Ethan Gruber) 11.30 Statistical exploration of PELLA data (Julien Olivier) 12.00 Lunch break Part 2: Imperial economic space - using PELLA to write a new history 1.30 What is an Alexander? (Andrew Meadows) 2.00 The Destruction and Recreation of Monetary Zones in the Wake of Alexander’s Conquests (Peter van Alfen) 2.30 Exploring localities: a die study of Alexanders from Damascus (Simon Glenn) 3.00 Tea break 3.30 The impact of Alexander’s conquest on minted silver: new data from metallurgical analysis of coins kept at the BnF (Maryse Blet-Lemarquand, Julien Olivier, Caroline Carrier, Frédérique Duyrat) 4.00 The first generation of Alexander’s influence: diversity of empire (Karsten Dahmen) 4.30 Alexander gold coinage throughout the Empire and beyond (Frédérique Duyrat) 5.00 General discussion 6.00 Reception at the Ashmolean Museum |
Tuesday 4th April Part 3: Cultural interaction and legacy 9.30 The coinage of Alexander the Great as perceived during the 16th -18th centuries (François de Callataÿ) 10.00 The legacy of Alexander: money in Central Asia (Simon Glenn) 10.30 Looting and its impact: the case of Alexanders from the Near East and the role of an online corpus project (Caroline Carrier & Simon Glenn) 11.00 The debate about the spread of Alexander's coinage and its economic impact: engaging with the historiographical longue durée (Pierre Briant) 11.30 Conclusion: Alexander: the Wider Vision (Robin Lane Fox) 12.00 The Future: 1. New functionalities for coins in the BnF catalogue general (Frédérique Duyrat and Julien Olivier) 2. The Hellenistic Royal Coinages Project (Peter van Alfen) |