West Coast Flooded With Denver Coins, East Coast With Philly

That's great! Forced Circulation!

I'm game; I'll send data--what day, what denomination, what criteria, to whom?

edit: anybody need a graduate research project for their anthropology degree? or economics?

I live in Edmonton, Alberta, and when I find an American coin mixed in with normal coins it is almost always from Denver. In my collection of State Quarters found in circulation, I have 32 from Denver compared to 17 from Philadelphia (and the majority of my duplicate State Quarters are from Denver as well).

I wonder what the breakdown is like in Colorado?

I have an idea of what I'd want to do at least in terms of data collection criteria, it's mostly a matter of figuring out how to set it up so that people can submit information to it easily (and also have it be easy to administer!). As far as analyzing goes, that becomes a statistics application. I'm not at all current in the sort of math that might be helpful but I have some vague notions of simply trying to graph the data and see where that goes (e.g. show me where all of the 1968 D pennies reported to date have been found)

Since I moved to Arizona a few months ago I have noticed several more "S" cents and nickels in circulation and quite an uptick in "S" mint cents in box searching. I just went through $50 in cents this weekend and found a couple dozen 68-74 S cents, almost double the rate I usually got back in Illinois. I also seem to find more "S" mint Wheats as well but don't have real numbers to back that up.

In Illinois we seemed to be in the Denver Mint distribution region, "P" coins, while plentiful, were dwarfed by the number of "D"'s. Same here in Arizona, but there are even fewer "P" coins to be found.

I'm finally starting on a project I've had in mind for some time, which is to try to do a study on coin circulation by collecting statistics on coins found all across the country, analyzing the data, and then creating graphs and maps of the results.

I just started yesterday on the coding side of it, so there are no pretty pictures yet. Those will be forthcoming.

But I did want to start raising awareness in the numismatic community and particularly CRH types, as any of us who are willing to hunt through rolls of coins are probably also able and hopefully willing to spend a little extra time documenting some of their work as they go.

What I'm looking for is not only *what* you find, but *where* and *when* you got the coins. So for example, say you pick up roll(s) or box(es) of coins from a bank. I'm looking for a spreadsheet (prefer simple .csv format, easier to parse than raw Excel or .ods) which has meta information on the contents (what type of coin, what zip code the source of the coins is in, and what date you got them) in the filename of the spreadsheet. The contents would be simply the year of each coin in the first column, the mintmark in the second. If you want to add more fields for things like quality, variants, etc feel free to add those as later columns. I'm primarily interested in the date and mint (and where and when you got the coins - those are necessary components as well), the quality of the coin might be useful too, but I have not been making an effort to grade coins as I make my own spreadsheets. If others do, perhaps we'll use that data later on.

Where I see this going is a series of maps that show how coins circulate over time. The question in my mind that started this all was wondering, as someone living in the Philadelphia suburbs and seeing a large number of P minted coins, how far west I should travel to improve my chances satisfactorily of finding D mints more often. Is Pittsburgh good enough? Is St. Louis better than Chicago? That sort of thing. With enough data, the answers will be apparent.

So perhaps some of the more detail oriented among you already have data like this lying around. If not, please consider generating and sending me some in the course of your CRH activities. While volume is important (the more the better) I recognize it may add time to your normal CRH workflow to record your finds as you go, so I should say that any data I get is better than no data. Even getting a single roll's data from one person in one zip code in one year will add to the results in a way that dozens of boxes in a single zip code cannot. Volume of contributors is in some ways more important than volume of coins documented. I may at some stage even go as far as trying to get some mobile phone apps written to send info on individual coins, but that's farther down the road.

Feedback welcome!

Kim Brown has hit one of my unasked questions. Where did the "S" mint marks get released? I save the older "S' coins as I CRH just because we don't see them in upstate New York. Proof sets are the source of modern "S" mint marks. I don't anticipate modern proof set coins in my coin roll hunting.

V, I'm hoping to prove that by illustration. All I need is a lot of raw data of coins collected across the country. I can't realistically travel around and do it all myself, so I'm hoping that I can enlist the numismatic community to help out. In the end we'll have a series of maps that show coin concentrations across the US with all sorts of different criteria (coins found in the same year of mint, coins from the last 5 years ago, etc) - the constant being showing relative concentrations of Ps, Ds, Ss.