Carved in Stone? Not Only: Towards Digitizing Cemeteries in the State of Israel and Interdisciplinary Cooperation in Colleges

Imagine that of all the physical remnants left by the residents of Land of Israel from the 20th century, all that was left were cemeteries. Could we sketch the chronicles and power structures in the land based on them? What can we know about what the buriers wanted to preserve for eternity? Concerns about vanishing cemeteries and the increase in virtual consumption of history led us, lecturers in Tourism Management, Software Engineering, and Land of Israel Studies to digitally preserve the small cemeteries in northern Israel in a crowd-friendly, accessible, and annotatable system. We built a mobile application (app) and website to record, annotate, and search information about cemeteries and graves. Anybody can download the app and document graves or use it to navigate to graves of interest. Anybody can research information on the website and add comments or sign up to become an editor. The app records what’s written on graves, takes pictures, and records GPS coordinates. The data are then uploaded to the website where they can be searched, updated, or commented on. We can track causes of death, quality and length of life, and important community symbols. It will be possible to derive insights about socioeconomic factors, family structure, and the level of religiousness or secularness of the society. To get started, we have documented the cemeteries in Menahemia, Ein Gev, Yavneel, Maagan, Hispin, and parts of Rosh Pina. Documentation is ongoing. We intend to expand the system to enable Dark Tourism, Couch Tourism, and genealogical research.

Recommended citation: Michael J. May and Efrat Kantor. Carved in Stone? Not Only: Towards Digitizing Cemeteries in the State of Israel and Interdisciplinary Cooperation in Colleges in 35th Annual Conference of the Association for Israel Studies (AIS 2019), Israel, 2019.
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