Drones, Phones, and Stones: Initial Testing of a Role-Based, Computer-Supported Approach to Collaborative Cemetery Indexing

After project organizers used a drone to create a high-resolution aerial map of a historic cemetery, sets of volunteers served in four distinct, interdependent roles to photograph, research, restore, and geospatially index the cemetery’s many unrecorded interments. Here, we share observations from our initial tests of this approach, which included a visit of volunteers for synchronous on-site work. We explore the differences in volunteer behavior and performance relative to organizer expectations and how the interdependence of the four roles is impacted by these differences.