We used a lot of digital techniques at the pauper cemetery. HCPCP used collaborative participation, by making the site public and encouraging help from people who might have information. We made the blog that is for public access on what we are doing. The project has used 3D scanning but not in the field. With 3D scanning you can recreate what a site might have looked like before it broken or got the weeds overgrown on it. We used our phones to record the data and take pictures of the grave site. We tried to be as open about the project with community as possible. We wanted to use crowd sourcing as much as possible to learn who was buried at the site and to help make the entries of the site as detailed as possible.
The use of digital technology has new ethical issues. It is a great way for public participation, however there is not much to tell collaborate with what someone tells us. It also relies on voluntarism from the public for our information. It has been criticized as free labor and contributing to neo-liberalist economies. But using digital technology made collecting the data easy as all we had to do was input it into our phones. The complication was if the phone died as it used a lot of the battery, there was no place to charge your phone if it died in the process of recording. The cell phones also relied on signal to use which is not always reliable in the middle of a cemetery.
This Spring 2018 semester, we got extra equipment to 3D techniques. One is a done that will be used to record the cemetery from an aerial space view. Another interesting equipment is the iPad device that takes 3D pictures by taking multiple pictures around the monuments. It similar to a panoramic picture that one is able to take multiple pictures that interconnect, but this will create a 3D image. This will help the viewers see the whole monuments (front, back, sides, and top) rather than just know the data lengths and other information recorded on the phone. The problems faced with both is it all depends on the weather. Also, like the phone issues, device signal has been difficult to obtain with the iPad 3D picture device.