CemoMemo

Abstract

Digitizing cemeteries and gravestones aids cultural preservation, genealogical search, dark tourism, and historical analysis. CemoMemo, an app and associated website, enables bottom-up crowd-sourced digitization of cemeteries, categorizing and indexing of gravestone data and metadata, and offering powerful full-text and numerical search. To date, CemoMemo has nearly 5,000 graves from over 130 cemeteries in 10 countries with the majority being Jewish graves in Israel and the USA. We detail CemoMemo's deployment and component models, technical attributes, and user models. CemoMemo went through two design iterations and architectures. We detail its initial architecture and the reasons that led to the change in architecture. To show its utility, we use CemoMemo's data for a historical analysis of two Jewish cemeteries from a similar period, eliciting cultural and ethnological difference between them. We present lessons learned from developing and operating CemoMemo for over 1 year and point to future directions of development.