Drones, Phones, and Stones: Visualization for Collaborative Digitization of Historic Cemeteries

Don Engel, Jacob Rubinstein

Abstract: Historic cemeteries face ravages of time, weather, and vandalism. We first captured hundreds of images for each of several unindexed historic cemeteries. We then used a high performance computing system to orthorectify these images into ultraresolution (billions of pixels), georeferenced, tiled images. Here, we describe the interactive visualization we developed using these tiled images to enable volunteers to collaboratively map graves and identify burials. Our ongoing work tests the capacity of this visualization to enable coordination between volunteers with distinct and often asynchronous assignments, including photography, mapping, research, and restoration.