Reflectance Transformation Imaging for Roman Coin Identification: Archaeology and Education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2001 the Department of Classics acquired pieces from the Diniacopolous family collection, along with a large number of coins. The majority of these coins were minted in Alexandria and vary in dates from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine period with the bulk from the Roman Imperial Period date range. While some of the coins are in decent condition and their legends and reliefs can be read with the naked eye, most require the use of imaging technology in order to be identified. This presentation will discuss results of a project currently underway to image the coins using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), a cost effective technique, which has also been used by the department at Cataraqui Cemetery to recover eroded tombstone inscriptions. While some coins were extensively eroded and thus could not be classified, the technique showed impressive results allowing most coins to be identified and dated. The presentation will also outline how RTI can be used in education, as bags of coins can be cheaply acquired by educators, thus allowing students at the primary and secondary school level to actively participate in deciphering corroded coins. This project demonstrates that RTI can be applied to a wide range of artefacts and is a valuable tool in preserving cultural heritage.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it