In March 2023, INCULTUM partners Promoter and Eachtra met to discuss about the work ongoing in the Pilot 9 Historic Graves of Ireland.
This online project capitalized on the phenomenon of Irish diaspora, supporting Irish descents in maintaining or rediscovering their connection with Irish cultural identity and heritage. The project put together a worldwide community of more than 15,000 users, collaborating in generating a nationwide genealogical dataset. The initiative started in 2010, as a community-focused participatory grassroots heritage project, where local community groups living in Ireland are trained in low-cost high-tech field survey of historic graveyards and recording of their own oral histories.
In almost a decade, historicgraves.com published online more than 800 cemeteries, recording the location of approximatively 100,000 graves and collaboratively transcribing the details of 196,808 people, and counting. Community co-production happens within a freely available online platform, created for the transcription of memorial epitaphs. Training workshops are offered to local communities interested in contributing to surveying and transcribing historic graveyards.
In the framework of INCULTUM, work is done to augment the touristic potential of such community heritage “micro-projects”, especially by improving communications among communities and also among those communities and the diaspora population to whom they supply heritage data and stories.
This entailed modification of the web platform as well as running a series of local and virtual workshops, to learn from the participating community groups, fostering the combination of new groups and older more experienced groups in order to spark new exchanges.
Discover the INCULTUM Pilots: https://incultum.eu/pilots/
All photos courtesy of Promoter.
