BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//pretalx//pretalx.com//spathum24//talk//JUESDT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:CET BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20001029T040000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10 TZNAME:CET TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20000326T030000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=3 TZNAME:CEST TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:pretalx-spathum24-JUESDT@pretalx.com DTSTART;TZID=CET:20240927T100000 DTEND;TZID=CET:20240927T103000 DESCRIPTION:SZD: “Steinerne Zeugen digital” (Digital Stone Witnesses) i s a 24 year project to document\, preserve and disseminate information fro m Jewish Cemeteries across Germany.\n\nThere are more than 2000 surviving Jewish cemeteries in Germany\, some dating as far back as the eleventh cen tury. Despite great losses\, no other European country possesses a compara bly old\, rich and multi-layered Jewish tradition. These cemeteries are am ong the oldest testimonies to sepulchral culture in Germany\, and therefor e their preservation\, documentation\, development and dissemination is a task of great importance both to the Jewish community and society as a who le. Nevertheless\, they have not yet received the attention they deserve a s places of remembrance with both religious and cultural significance\, as expressions of individual and corporate Jewish identity\, and as historic al\, literary and material sources.\n\nThis is where the Digital Stone Wit nesses 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\, mat erial and preservation of the gravestones\, a representative digital text and image corpus will be created\, documented and sustainably archived. Th is data will be combined with the digital recording of spatial and structu ral characteristics and detailed topographical relationships. As a result\ , a representative\, interdisciplinary\, multimodal data set will be creat ed and preserved in perpetuity. On this basis\, for the first time the gra ve inscriptions\, gravestone designs and spatial relationships within the cemeteries can be systematically analysed both diachronically and synchron ously. The results will be made accessible to the public and for further s cientific research.\n\nIn this presentation we will present the results an d activity from the first year of the project in one specific graveyard. T he Walsdorf cemetery is located in Upper Franconia in the district of Bamb erg\, and contains over 1100 gravestones dating as far back as the 17th ce ntury. The majority of the older stones are made of frangible sandstone\, and are thus susceptible to weathering and environmental damage\, a proces s potentially accelerating due to climate change. Subsequently\, many of t he inscriptions are very hard\, if not impossible\, to read\, and more are disappearing every year - taking with them invaluable and irreplaceable h istorical\, genealogical and sociological data.\n\nBamberg’s DTHC Resear ch Group (Digital Technologies in Heritage) has recorded the cemetery with a variety of digital technologies\, including mobile-mapping \, terrestri al laser scanning (with the Leica BLK) and GIS mapping to capture topologi cal and structural data. The data is used to create an accurate\, geo-refe renced plans of the cemeteries in their current state\, with each survivin g 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 heterogene ous data from multiple sources. \nIn addition to a digital photography cam paign\, colleagues from the Jewish studies department in Bamberg and the S teinheim institute are conducting digital epigraphy to record and interpre t the surviving inscriptions. The epigraphic information will be recorded using the Epidoc TEI/XML (Text Encoding Inititative) compliant format ensu ring maximum interoperability and sustainability. \n\nIn 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 avai lable online to aid in the interpretation\, and have already revealed hith erto illegible information. \n\nAll information\, including the transcribe d inscriptions\, typological\, geospatial and structural data\, the intera ctive geo-referenced plan of the cemetery\, 2D photographs and 3D models w ill 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 e ncoded using a custom ontology and stored as linked open data using variou s standard vocabularies including the Bamberg Vocabulary for Historic Arch itecture. \n\nThe combined data including all the multi-modal components w ill be made available for epigraphical\, building\, and monument research and will be made available to the public as an open access semantic web se rvice.\n\nThis 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 a nd how GIS data intersects with and supports traditional disciplines such as epigraphy\, history and genealogical studies. DTSTAMP:20260315T104534Z LOCATION:MG1 00.04 Hörsaal SUMMARY:Digital Stone Witnesses: a multi-modal survey of Jewish graveyards across Germany - John Hindmarch\, Mona Hess URL:https://pretalx.com/spathum24/talk/JUESDT/ END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR