The Gravestone Project (TGP) is a digital humanities website that brings scholars, students, and enthusiasts together to collect, preserve, and analyze artifacts memorializing the dead—gravestones, obituaries, and similar records from 17th- to 19th-century cemeteries and memorials. Sponsored by Dr. Amy Giroux of UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research and Dr. Emily B. Stanback of the University of Southern Mississippi, the project addresses a real gap: a wealth of culturally significant material about the dead exists, but lacks a centralized, well-maintained digital home where it can be studied. Building on an existing TGP website, this team expanded it into a far more powerful research platform—adding robust artifact search, an interactive map (via Leaflet) for spotting geographic trends across artifacts, translations of foreign-language inscriptions, and an in-depth tagging system for grouping related records by artifact type and relationships between individuals. Administrators gain tools to add and edit artifacts, manage tags, and oversee user accounts. Designed deliberately for growth, the platform lays a foundation that future teams can keep building on, turning scattered memorial records into an accessible, collaborative archive for studying the lives and cultures of the past.
