Death By Data - Auditing the US Cemetery Landscape
Channel: Digital Matters
Date: 2023-03-21

Despite often being referred to as the “Great Equalizer,” death, and more specifically access to death rites and burial, is anything but impartial. Religion, race, ethnicity, class, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and more all have a profound impact on the ways in which a given individual is treated after they have passed. The US Cemetery Audit uses data scraped from FindAGrave.com to approach the US deathscapes in the aggregate to better understand the reciprocal impacts that demography, culture, politics, and economics have on death’s spaces. As work in progress, this talk will focus on the project’s methodology, share summary visualizations and mapping efforts, and discuss preliminary findings and next steps.