Hybrid Cemetery Culture: Making Death Matter in Cultural Heritage Using Smart Mobile Technologies

Abstract

This paper discusses the urban cemetery as a site of intangible cultural practices and ubiquitous computing as an approach to enhance heritage sites. The paper introduces an experience assessment tool as a mobile phone application that audio-visually augments a heritage interpretation programme, using a contemporary Danish urban cemetery as case. It discusses a number of emerging digital platforms for mourning, heritage and online remembrance that influence the use of the urban cemetery today, and show the potentials of learning and experience from tethering burial sites with augmented mobile mediations of historic heritage information and cultural practices of remembrance. The paper concludes, that an augmentation of the urban cemetery culture points to a high significance amongst citizens, and that experience design through mobile technologies promises an enhanced meaning in an often overlooked urban site. Due to the sensitive subject matter of death and mourning, the participation of the public in general faces challenges that need attention when planning a cultural heritage programme.

The Evolving Landscape: Funerals, Cemeteries, Memorialization, and Bereavement Support

“…In this regard, cemetery visits can be particularly helpful as they place personal grief in a social perspective (Francis, Kellaher, & Neophytou, 2000;Maddrell, 2013;Walter, Hourizi, Moncur, & Pitsillides, 2012). Cemeteries are not only repositories of family memories and memorials; they reflect the social history of a suburb or town where they are located (Sabra, Andersen, & Rodil, 2015;Veale, 2004). Continuity with this history needs to be respected while contemporary memorials are added and further traditions from recent migrant communities and other cultural traditions are incorporated.…”

The Ethics of Engagement: Designing for Augmented Reality Experiences at Sites of Dark Tourism

“…Another series of studies [3,4,5] has been done on AR encounters at places like cemeteries, concentration camps, and gloomy cultural sites. These pieces, however, hardly ever address the site's ethical representation of tragedy or death directly.…”

A Review of the Role of Social Media for the Cultural Heritage Sustainability

“…Another main approach is storytelling by collecting and analyzing narratives, including both short-term comments and blogs, through popular social media apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, and collective memory websites [25,34,[54][55][56]. In parallel, mapping is one of the crucial tools to get an insight into the community mechanism and user's expectations [25,26,54,59,60]. Moreover, in some cases, online surveys based on selected platforms are spread to strengthen the right and ability of multi voices [19,28,33,36,55] It should be noted that the methods mentioned above are not exclusive of each other.…”