Cemetery Celebrations and the Segregation of the Dead – Part 2

Inspired by the budding area of digital humanities at Geneseo, for about a month now I have been slowly working to accumulate the ideas from my previous cemetery celebrations post into a digital humanities project. Finding photos from my childhood in Green-Wood Cemetery and constantly seeing the giant Road Atlas I bought for this class in my peripheral pile of books sparked the idea to combine multiple types of information onto a map of Green-Wood Cemetery.

The map covers a wide array of topics related to or from this class. Whether locating residents of the cemetery (such as Samuel Morse, “Boss” Tweed, and even Brendan and Connor Moore) and linking them to our class discussions, acknowledging my struggles to remember the events of my childhood, or simply pointing out a few interesting facts about the Cemetery, I have tried my best to make sure you can find something interesting and worth further research (and perhaps spark a blog post of your own if you feel particularly inspired).

Via Google MyMaps, I present: The Segregation of the Dead and the Living in Green-Wood Cemetery.

Here is a link to the properly sized map, since the embedded version here is quite small.

Sometimes Google MyMaps doesn’t properly format the map’s description box, so I have copied it with proper formatting here. This paratext explains the map’s taxonomy:

“Placing events from my childhood onto a map of Green-Wood Cemetery, alongside facts about the cemetery and its permanent residents, has helped me organize and interpret my ideas in this class as well as my memories.

Points of interest are grouped in layers, able to be toggled on/off the map, and are organized by (an arbitrary) color. The symbol for each point of interest visually represents a category which best fits its significance.

Descriptions for the famous inhabitants follow this pattern:
• Years of birth and death
• A quote of their occupational/historical significance from Green-wood Cemetery’s tour map, if applicable (via their website)
• An anecdote or fact about the person which I found interesting and pertaining to the class. Connections to the class may be explicitly stated or merely prompt further investigation.

All photos in the School Events layer were taken by my dad, Michael Snyder (credits and copyrights to him).”

As a result of working on this project for so long, I kept finding new things to add to the map and relate between the cemetery and our class. This has been good for the scope of the project, but bad for my sanity and workload, so I am finally forcing myself to push the big blue “Publish” button and release my work into the world.

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