SZD: “Steinerne Zeugen digital” (Digital Stone Witnesses) is a 24 year project to document, preserve and disseminate information from Jewish Cemeteries across Germany.

There are more than 2000 surviving Jewish cemeteries in Germany, some dating as far back as the eleventh century. Despite great losses, no other European country possesses a comparably old, rich and multi-layered Jewish tradition. These cemeteries are among the oldest testimonies to sepulchral culture in Germany, and therefore their preservation, documentation, development and dissemination is a task of great importance both to the Jewish community and society as a whole. Nevertheless, they have not yet received the attention they deserve as places of remembrance with both religious and cultural significance, as expressions of individual and corporate Jewish identity, and as historical, literary and material sources.

This is where the Digital Stone Witnesses project comes in: By selecting, collecting and editing Hebrew and Hebrew-German tomb inscriptions from across the German-speaking countries; and by recording and analysing the form, structure, construction, material and preservation of the gravestones, a representative digital text and image corpus will be created, documented and sustainably archived. This data will be combined with the digital recording of spatial and structural characteristics and detailed topographical relationships. As a result, a representative, interdisciplinary, multimodal data set will be created and preserved in perpetuity. On this basis, for the first time the grave inscriptions, gravestone designs and spatial relationships within the cemeteries can be systematically analysed both diachronically and synchronously. The results will be made accessible to the public and for further scientific research.

In this presentation we will present the results and activity from the first year of the project in one specific graveyard. The Walsdorf cemetery is located in Upper Franconia in the district of Bamberg, and contains over 1100 gravestones dating as far back as the 17th century. The majority of the older stones are made of frangible sandstone, and are thus susceptible to weathering and environmental damage, a process potentially accelerating due to climate change. Subsequently, many of the inscriptions are very hard, if not impossible, to read, and more are disappearing every year - taking with them invaluable and irreplaceable historical, genealogical and sociological data.

Bamberg’s DTHC Research Group (Digital Technologies in Heritage) has recorded the cemetery with a variety of digital technologies, including mobile-mapping , terrestrial laser scanning (with the Leica BLK) and GIS mapping to capture topological and structural data. The data is used to create an accurate, geo-referenced plans of the cemeteries in their current state, with each surviving gravestone individually recorded and identified. As part of the project, methodologies and workflows for automating the conversion of laser scan data to CAD models are being developed and evaluated. These plans will be used for monitoring, to map changes and damage from the past and into the future, and to create interactive maps that can link together heterogeneous data from multiple sources.
In addition to a digital photography campaign, colleagues from the Jewish studies department in Bamberg and the Steinheim institute are conducting digital epigraphy to record and interpret the surviving inscriptions. The epigraphic information will be recorded using the Epidoc TEI/XML (Text Encoding Inititative) compliant format ensuring maximum interoperability and sustainability.

In addition, stones with particularly hard to read inscriptions, due to weathering, damage or vegetation have been further recorded in 3D using Structure from Motion techniques. The 3D models, both with and without texture, are made available online to aid in the interpretation, and have already revealed hitherto illegible information.

All information, including the transcribed inscriptions, typological, geospatial and structural data, the interactive geo-referenced plan of the cemetery, 2D photographs and 3D models will be entered into MonArch, an information system and research platform specifically developed for spatial digital documentation which allows the aggregation of a wide variety of heterogeneous data. Information will be encoded using a custom ontology and stored as linked open data using various standard vocabularies including the Bamberg Vocabulary for Historic Architecture.

The combined data including all the multi-modal components will be made available for epigraphical, building, and monument research and will be made available to the public as an open access semantic web service.

This presentation will present the results so far achieved, and the lessons learned in the first year of this ongoing 24 year project. We will explore the intersection of geospatial science with the humanities and how GIS data intersects with and supports traditional disciplines such as epigraphy, history and genealogical studies.