Between documentation and sample: Creating a digital cultural heritage archive of gravesites, tombs and tombstones

Abstract

Our research aims at the development of a large-scale digital archive on funerary and epigraphic practices with a focus on Taiwan and Penghu. Designed to cater to a great variety of research questions in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the archive has to respond equally to the requirements of qualitative and quantitative analyses. In this paper, we present an interpretation on what this might mean and how the archive has been constructed to achieve this aim. Starting from definitions of documentation and sample, as qualities of survey data that facilitate a qualitative and quantitative analysis respectively, we identify conflicts and congruence as well as possible crossovers in these two notions. Then, using the nine year history of our survey on tombstones and our first steps in surveying land god shrines, we show how different survey data have been merged into one archive and what the benefits of this hybrid approach are. We also reflect on the restrictions that arise from this hybrid design, especially for the interpretation of quantitative data. We conclude that such a hybrid archive is superior to any of the approaches in isolation, particularly in projects related to the digitization of endangered cultural heritage.