Using AI for Digital Remembrance and Historical Understanding of Cemeteries and Burial Culture

Cemetery gravestones are cultural objects that allow communities to remember those who were once part of their community but are no longer. They serve as cultural and social objects for gathering, memorialization, and religious ceremonies. The burial process itself includes social, religious, and cultural rituals that reflect the burying and remembering community The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI tools brought new technologies and tools that we can use to preserve communal memory. Those tools can help us better understand how cemeteries are built, how burial rituals proceed, how communities use cemeteries and gravestones for remembrance, and how families recall their departed loved ones.

As a first step towards that vision, we built the CemoMemo online cemetery digitization platform that allows the crowdsourced documentation of cemetery gravestones. We are currently adding AI automation to the platform to make documentation quicker and more automatic. Next generation memorial systems can take memory in novel directions, including immersive augmented reality experiences and virtual 3D tours of cemeteries and burial rituals.

We are looking for partners to build a next generation platform to remember the dead, understand memorial culture, and make it available to the public. Different cultures use memorial rituals and materials to remember and new generative AI, conversational interfaces, and augmented reality (AR) systems can help preserve them for the future.