Using Generative AI to Analyze and Understand Cemetery Gravestones and Burial Culture
Date:
Cemeteries are places where we remember the dead through physical memorials, religious rituals, and national ceremonies. As places of memory, they figure prominently in the national conscious on days of national remembrance. Preserving and studying these spaces is vital for understanding Israeli and Jewish burial culture. In 2019, we launched CemoMemo, an online system to digitally document cemeteries in Israel and abroad, enabling historical research and virtual visits and creating a digital snapshot safe from physical damage or access restrictions due to war or pandemic.
Traditional cemetery digitization systems rely on volunteers to photograph gravestones, transcribe epitaphs, and categorize information, limiting their scalability. To overcome these limitations, we developed automation tools powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI) that transform cemetery documentation and presentation. Automation makes cemetery documentation more efficient and enables new features such as content generation and interactive artifacts that improve understanding and historical analysis of Israeli cemetery burial culture. This talk will present automation tools we developed for CemoMemo, including:
Per-cemetery statistics: Dates, symbols, religious/secular markers, and epitaph sentiment analysis
Multi-lingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and automatic text categorization for diverse inscription languages (Hebrew, English, Arabic)
Dynamic cemetery summaries: Automatically generated “landing pages” including cultural context and notable burials.
Interactive AI chatbot: A conversational interface trained on cemetery data for interactive learning about the cemetery, its burial culture, and those buried within.
By combining cultural heritage with cutting-edge technology, CemoMemo makes cemeteries more accessible and offers fresh insights into Israeli and Jewish burial traditions.
You can see the slides here