Coryssa tutorial

Discussion in 'Ancient Coins' started by Suarez, Feb 15, 2020.

  1. Suarez

    Suarez Well-Known Member

    To try to alleviate frustration...

    Coryssa was started out of my own frustration back in 2007 when all we had for pro-level research was CoinArchives. As good as that database was (and I used it daily as did who knows how many other people) all you had to tame the beast was a search bar. While in many cases that's good enough in others I wasted far too much time separating signal from noise.

    The most extreme example of this was if you wanted to look up Nero asses. If I was clumsy enough to throw at it a "nero as" I'd get flooded with practically the whole database. Leaving it to just "nero" would still return coins of Nero contaminated with way too many records of his ancestors. I think there were boolean operators that could be used as a crude filter but it was clearly not optimized for what I needed.

    Coryssa pulls an enormous amount of data. It hosts largely the same records as CoinArchives and ACS but also includes the last ten years of ebay, Wildwinds and several thousand hand-entered auctions from before the internet. It attempts to massage all this data by funneling it into pre-defined sections with relevant sub-sections in a similar way to how ebay works. While on ebay you could look for anything from the homepage navigating the different categories focuses your search and gives you more relevant results.

    There are many additional tools that allow you to find data waaaaaay more efficiently than you ever could with keyword searches alone. To use the initial example, you would find Nero's asses by selecting Roman Imperial (RI)
    upload_2020-2-15_18-12-4.png

    You can then go to All Coins at the top or begin narrowing your search to a specific subset as given on the available selling venues, each a subset of the top category
    upload_2020-2-15_18-13-59.png

    You are then presented with all of the rulers for RI

    upload_2020-2-15_18-15-46.png

    Clicking this link brings you to a new page which now gives you additional filters and sorting modes. Clicking on the Denomination at left you should see a screen like this

    upload_2020-2-15_18-21-2.png

    Now take a moment to consider what you have done. With just four clicks you have blown past 99.99% of the records that are irrelevant to your search. You could now begin your search bar query limiting the scope to just these records. However, you could keep going. Say I'm looking for the most beautiful Temple of Janus. After having clicked on the As filter above you could then open up the Type field and select Temple

    upload_2020-2-15_19-0-3.png

    Now that you have this selection going back to the top you could change the sorting order from the default showing the latest records to Price and you would get some spectacularly well-preserved coins
    upload_2020-2-15_18-29-46.png

    And that's just the start. You can play with filters for weight, date and prices in both forward and reverse orders. It gives you the ability to do things no other website can such as answering very specific questions like "What's the heaviest coin of such and such sold in the last so many years?" or "What's the auctioneer with the highest average hammer price?" or comparative type questions like "Who's the rarest emperor?" and "What's the most common mint to issue xyz?". You can also simply browse what auction catalogs looked like a hundred years ago for the fun of it.

    Now for the downside. For the most part all the records in the database have been classified according to the text in the descriptions. A bot runs on a schedule looking for keywords which it then sticks where it thinks it belongs. Although it's gotten pretty sophisticated (the code runs several thousand lines) records can still wind up hilariously off track. As of this moment it falls to me and a part-time temp to correct the wayward records and manually classify those that the bot can't place. With some 1,000 records being added daily it's just impossible to keep up.

    So, if the above way of doing things doesn't get you the results you can of course resort to a simple Google-style search. Go back to the beginning, choose your civ and here's your low-tech starting point:

    upload_2020-2-15_18-40-41.png

    A keyword here will look through the selected era's records. With no checkmark it will only search the record title and if you enter more than one term it will look for instances of all the matching keywords. I recommend you use the description box as searching only the titles is really only useful for ebay coins. Also, these searches can be very slow as the CPU gives these very low priority (nudging you to use the sections) and if you use multiple checkboxes it might eventually time out before you get the results.

    Another thing to consider is that this project started out as a way for me to begin work on my research which is almost 100% focused on Roman imperial and Byzantine. These two are therefore the most developed sections. Roman Republican and provincials are somewhat reliable and then from there it's downhill for lack of experience. You will probably be better off staying with keyword search in the Greek and Celtic/DarkAges areas as the sections are almost entirely curated by the bot scripts.

    If you have problems or something doesn't make sense or you want to help clean up let me know. You can also upload your own records.

    Rasiel
     
    Last edited: Feb 15, 2020
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  3. Suarez

    Suarez Well-Known Member

    I forgot to mention that if you're relying on keyword searches your best bet is to use one keyword and then run a secondary search with the checkbox "Search only these results" ---> and again, use mainly the description box unless you're surfing old ebay records.
     
  4. AncientJoe

    AncientJoe Well-Known Member

    I've used Coryssa extensively over the last several years (finding some solid leads for pedigrees I was hunting) and really value the service you're providing; thank you very much!
     
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  5. Ed Snible

    Ed Snible Well-Known Member

    Because I use Coryssa for Greek coins you use it very different from me.

    It might be nice if there was a search bar on the home page, offering a keyword search of "All".

    Today I searched Coryssa for "harpa", the weapon Perseus used. I have a few coins with this as a type and I wanted to look for others. Coryssa did not disappoint -- it showed me some interesting coins with harpas.

    I saw a category for "Brockages & Overstruck", and I clicked on it, and there was a coin in my collection, complete with the seller's photograph which is better than my photograph:

    https://www.coryssa.org/842306/subc...oxes/0/search_title/on/period/all/period/all/

    The comments box was open, so I filled in some details about the counterstamp that I had discovered. I also saved the picture.

    What I like about Coryssa is how thorough it is.

    Consider adding a "Direct URL" field like ACSearch.info has.

    Your record has no seller, and no date. I bought it in January 2011. People will be using this for provenance. If your seller and date detector fail it might be worthwhile to output the date you injested the record, and say something like "dealer site, before 2012" or something.

    I will let you decide if you want to offer the ability for users to suggest categorization for the uncategorized coins, or a button to vote a coin as being miscategorized.
     
  6. Suarez

    Suarez Well-Known Member

    Thanks for the suggestions, Ed!

    - there is no site-wide search function but you don't really need it unless somehow your search might straddle more than one period. If there's a good case for this then I could consider implementing it.

    - I'm not familiar with the direct URL feature from ACS. If it's a URL shortener (I hate those mile long URLs) then that would be desirable. For single records you can delete everything after the number, which is the record id.

    - Your coin (reachable https://www.coryssa.org/842306) was imported from Tantalus and it was a really sloppy migration. I apologize for how ugly those records are formatted and the low level of information.

    If you personally want to add a record there's a tool for doing so using link http://coinvac.crabdance.com/index.php/home/index after a few days your record will automatically show up on the main site under the User Added section at the bottom of the page after clicking on a period. The advantage here is that you have much more control over your record description, images, etc. However, it's admittedly nowhere near as fancy as what you can do with Tantalus.

    Rasiel
     
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  7. Ed Snible

    Ed Snible Well-Known Member

    Everyone I have shown Coryssa to starts trying to type a keyword in the home page comment box. Just make a box, and have it be the same as filling in the "keyword" box under the category All(2,585,745)

    If you do a search on ACSearch, say for "nero as", and click on the first result, the URL bar in the browser is https://www.acsearch.info/search.ht...s=1&thesaurus=1&order=0&currency=usd&company= which isn't something safe to share with friends. At the top of the details page it says "Direct URL: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=4375855". That one is safe to share with friends. I figured out that I could do https://www.coryssa.org/842306 through trial and error. Consider adding that to the page, to help people who don't know that. Do everything you can to make those numbers stable.

    Stable URLs are a big deal. I have a lot of records in my database leading to sixbid.com URLs. These all changed last year which is a huge pain.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]
     
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  8. Broucheion

    Broucheion Well-Known Member

    Hi @Suarez,

    Thank you for this resource. I just discovered Coryssa a few weeks back. With this discussion I decided to give it another look and add comments to coins that I own and some attributions to coins without any. I was disappointed that I could not search the comments afterwards for words like "own" or "mine" or my 'signature' so I could locate all the coins I annotated. Should you be considering making more things searchable, I would vote for the comments.

    - Broucheion
     
  9. Suarez

    Suarez Well-Known Member

    Excellent suggestion. I'll add it to the queue of new features!
     
  10. maridvnvm

    maridvnvm Well-Known Member

    I took a quick look at the Septimius Severus coins from Alexandria and there are quite a few mis-attributions. This is despite the coins having been correctly allocated in the original listing. If the seller has included a large amount of additional but not relevant text (blurb) that contains the word Alexandria then the coin seems to be tagged to Alexandria.
     
  11. Justin Lee

    Justin Lee I learn by doing

    Quick note... Never used it before, so hopped in to try it out and am enjoying it so far! One simple suggestion would be to have the search list pagination navigation at both top and bottom of the results rather than just at the top.

    Edit: I would also love to see a visual indicator of the source of the data for entries in the the result. CNG is pretty self-explanatory, but others I get confused SS to if it was a traditional auction or Ebay entry, etc.
     
    Last edited: Feb 17, 2020
  12. Suarez

    Suarez Well-Known Member

    Maridinum: yeah, this sucks. Especially for ebay coins where (exactly as you point out) records with text descriptions that go on and on about Roman history are likely to wind up completely misplaced. As I go through them I put them in their place but the task is huge and I decided to get the RI and Byzantine records fixed up from 1900-2013 before going on to more recent records.... an absolutely immense pile of records. Even sadder for the rest of the civs which are getting almost zero human attention

    Justin: the visual indicator is the seller field at top. The title is a giveaway too. Ebay's titles are a free for all while auctioneers take on the format Auctioneer + Sale Name + #[lotnumber]

    Rasiel
     
  13. SeptimusT

    SeptimusT Well-Known Member

    AI can only do so much, and is easily confused. Even though some of the records on Coryssa aren't where they should be, that's a relatively easy problem to fix; the fact that it has collected (and preserved) so much data is definitely an impressive feat. There's real value in collecting and preserving more ephemeral sales information (like eBay).
     
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  14. Suarez

    Suarez Well-Known Member

    The bug reported yesterday with large images not resizing to fit the browser just got fixed :)
     
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  15. maridvnvm

    maridvnvm Well-Known Member

    Browsing through Probus - Lugdunum gives generally good results. There are a few oddities where the coins are actually of Vespasian (2), Domitian(1), Severus Alexander(1) or Postumus(1). There are some coins that look like they have been simply wrongly tagged, one of which is a coin of mine from Ticinum which turned out to be the last coin on the last page. There are many more errors where the listing itself contained the wrong attribution and these would rely on a human to look at the coin and determine that this is incorrect the majority of these are lazy attributions without taking into account the style of the mint where coins that are in fact RIC 861 Bust Type H (Serdica) or RIC 911 Bust Type H (Cyzicus) were listed as RIC 101 Bust Type H (Lugdunum). I have added comments to each one that I saw in my few minutes of perusing the listings. Is there some means of seeing coins that have had comments made as this would be quite useful and I couldn't find out how to do this?
    Regards,
    Martin
     
  16. maridvnvm

    maridvnvm Well-Known Member

    Would it be possible to exclude mints that do not make sense for a particular emperor. Probus includes Arelate, Mediolanum , Carthage, Constantinopolis, Sirmium and others. The coins that are tagged from these mints tend to be either not Probus or have been bragged into that mint because of the blurb. For example because Probus was born in Sirmium and this fact is in a variety of blurbs over 600 coins have been tagged to that mint but he never produced any coins from Sirmium. Excluding this mint for Probus would stop this false tagging.
     
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  17. Ed Snible

    Ed Snible Well-Known Member

    Would it be possible for the scraper to generate a % chance for each Coryssa category, and label the coin with the chance it is something else, and allow end-users to click "thumbs up" on alternatives if they think the bot got it wrong?

    So if the scraper thinks there is a 17% chance for Sirmium and a 2% chance for Carthage it puts it in Sirmium but lets users click "thumbs up" on Carthage. Later, a bot could fix this. Even Google, with all their resources, asks me how it did on the map route and where the door to the building is. We can't expect a single person writing a classifier to get it perfect. Let the users help you.
     
  18. maridvnvm

    maridvnvm Well-Known Member

    I took a look at Probus - Alexandria (only 23 coins in section) and this doesn't have a single coin of Probus from Alexandria in there. Something has gone wrong there.
     
  19. Suarez

    Suarez Well-Known Member

    I know this can be frustrating. I had thought about making all records directly editable by any user Wikipedia-style but worried, perhaps without justification, about vandalism.

    The temporary solution I can offer is to simply give anyone who thinks they might use the db regularly the admin tools to make these changes.

    The live server is "fed" from a test server which updates weekly sending it all the new records and overwriting any changes made. What you would do is connect to this test server (http://coinvac.crabdance.com/) and just make your edits there which take place immediately. You will need to email me so I can grant your ip address admin rights but after that you have control over any record in the database and the tools make it pretty easy to do this sort of thing. Here's a mini-tutorial

    Let's say we want to kick those emperors out of Probus and put them in the correct place.

    We cruise on over to the main Probus page as admin
    upload_2020-2-18_10-17-21.png

    Looks like the thumbnail generator isn't working right now but whatever, it doesn't matter for now. Right away you see the layout has changed allowing you to reallocate and delete records (reserved for junk/fakes) but let's home in on those suspicious Arelates

    When I click Arelate I get

    upload_2020-2-18_10-21-46.png

    The easiest way to move those two Constantines is to select the move checkbox and then pick Constantine I from the pulldown over to the left and finally click save at the bottom. The changes take effect immediately and the weights and prices recalculate resulting in data that's slightly more reliable.
    upload_2020-2-18_10-23-13.png

    There are frequent backups to fall back on should something go south but you can see why I'm hesitant to letting everyone be admin as this gives you full control over all the records. You guys obviously know what you're doing so happy to let you have at it.

    Since it's a testbed for the programmer, and is running as a virtual machine rather than a proper machine, it can be slower and things won't always work right but for the most part you'll probably want to do your research here since those bad records can be a really annoying intrusion.

    Rasiel
     
    Last edited: Feb 18, 2020
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