Interacting with Digital Memorials in a Cemetery: Insights from an Immersive Practice

Abstract

-This research intends to analyze how users that are also HCI designers relate to the interaction with digital memorials linked to graves through QRcodes. To do so, we have carried out an immersive practice in the Consolação Cemetery (São Paulo, Brazil), where that technology is used to tag the graves of famous deceased people and to guide the visitors in the site. Those QR code tags link the graves to an online application for digital memorials called MemoriAll. To address the problem, this paper analyzes the data collected from the surveys answered by the research subjects before and after the immersive practice, along with data from a semiotic inspection of MemoriAll.

Shall the robots remember? Conceptualising the role of non-human agents in digital memory communication

“…These practices are embedded in the architecture of the platforms hosting them and range from collaborative history-writing via online encyclopaedias (Luyt 2015;Pentzold 2009) to spreading history-related Internet memes (González-Aguilar and Makhortykh 2022;Khoruzhenko 2020). Other examples include making (audio)visual tributes to the past in the form of videos (Gibson and Jones 2012) or E-cards (Makhortykh and Sydorova 2022), establishing interactive digital memorials (de Bruyn 2010; Maciel et al 2017), or emotionally engaging with the traumatic past via digital self-representation at atrocity memorials (Bareither 2021).…”