Partnership
Living Heritage Institute
The Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) partnered with the USF Living Heritage Institute and to digitally preserve historical black cemeteries in the Tampa Bay area and central Florida. Responding to a community-based request, IDEx and interdisciplinary collaborators, including USF faculty, students, and BCN partners, used a suite of 3D technologies such as terrestrial laser scanning, structured-light 3D scanning, and digital photogrammetry to comprehensively document the site and its extant tombstones in their current state for posterity. Over a focused field campaign followed by detailed processing, the team recorded the entire cemetery plot and produced free, accessible 3D models and an interactive web-hosted map designed to ensure that the identities and stories of those interred are preserved and shared widely. This project not only contributes to the protection of an underdocumented cultural landscape but also serves as a prototype for future digital preservation efforts at similarly marginalized historic cemeteries, reinforcing IDEx鈥檚 role in community-engaged and technologically advanced cultural heritage documentation.
Building on this community-engaged initiative, IDEx applied a rigorous, multi-scalar digital methodology that produced both high-precision documentation and tangible research outcomes. The entire Mount Carmel Cemetery was recorded through terrestrial laser scanning, using multiple LiDAR units to generate a dense, georeferenced point cloud capable of isolating ground features even beneath heavy vegetation cover. Individual elements, ten headstones, a commemorative plaque, and a large wooden structural feature, were further documented through terrestrial digital photogrammetry and structured-light 3D scanning, allowing for object-level resolution and detailed surface analysis. Post-processing removed vegetation noise, clarified spatial relationships, and enabled the precise mapping, labeling, and interpretation of all extant features. Crucially, advanced visualization techniques enhanced the legibility of severely weathered inscriptions, leading to the identification of names and dates previously considered unreadable and transforming 鈥渦nknown鈥� burials into historically identifiable individuals. The resulting dataset鈥攃omprising georeferenced plans, high-resolution 3D models, and curated metadata鈥攏ow constitutes a permanent digital record of the cemetery, supporting future research, education, digital exhibitions, and inclusive public outreach initiatives while safeguarding the site against ongoing environmental and material loss.
So far, the projects focused on the cemeteries of Mount Carmel (Pasco County), 911爆料网st Elfers (New Port Richey, Pasco County) and Lake Maude (Winter Haven, Polk County.