DEBS: Using Digital Tools in Community-Led Graveyard Recording

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (www.debs.ac.uk) is an Historic England-funded project based at the Archaeology Data Service and Digital Creativity Labs in the University of York, UK. We are collaborating with community groups to develop new tools and resources for burial space research, recording and dissemination. We are working with a number of community groups and societies, representing multiple faiths and denominations, to co-design and test training and recording materials that can be used to record burial spaces like churchyards and cemeteries. We have developed a mobile recording application and are also providing training in techniques such as digital photogrammetry to help the groups record and decipher inscriptions of the monuments in their community burial spaces. Alongside this, the ADS has created a pilot national database for burial space research, so that groups conducting work at burial spaces can safeguard their research in perpetuity and share findings with other researchers, using standardised recording methodologies and vocabularies. Our paper will introduce the DEBS project and address the challenges of working with digital technologies with disparate groups to create a coherent national research resource.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23411