CemoMemo Cemetery Digitization

Cemeteries and gravestones can tell us a lot about the lifestyle and priorities of a community because they are part of the community’s collective memory. The poor condition of many cemeteries and gravestones causes us to fear that we will lose the information and memories stored within the gravestones. The fear of losing the text carved on graves, on the one hand, and the increasing popularity of digital consumption of history, on the other, have motivated us, academic staff and students in Tourism Studies, Software Engineering, and Land of Israel Studies at Kinneret Academic College to undertake the digitization of graves in the cemeteries that surround us – both to record what exists and to aid remembrance in the future.

We designed and built a system that lets you digitally record and document a grave and gravestone. The system documents the text on the grave, its features, its precise location, and can store pictures of the grave.

Most importantly, the documentation process is collective, or crowd based. Anybody can browse the database to correct or add information. Together we will build a database of our history, one gravestone at a time.