Projects

Headstone Addresses

Headstone Addresses is a spatiotemporal data visualization of cemetary headstones linked to their home addresses in China. It is a community project from the 2020 Digital Heritage Experiences grants stream. The project was supported by the Edmonton Heritage Council and the City of Edmonton.

My involvement with the project included assisting with gathering data in three Edmonton cemetaries with project lead (and my spouse) Elaine Yip, and then creating a data visualization that linked the gathered headstone data to birth date, burial date, and home address location.

A screenshot of Headstone Addresses, showing the map with a headstone selected, visually linking back to its home address on the map of China. A date filter slider is located below the map. — Headstone Addresses with a headstone selected, visually linking back to its home address on the map of China.

More information about the project can be found on its About page. The source code is up on GitHub, and the site is deployed with Netlify.

I built the data visualization using d3.js, and the site itself with Gatsby. The project was completed successfully on a short timeline — I’m still making some improvements on code quality and performance. But overall it has been well received as a research and research dissemination tool.

A screenshot of Headstone Addresses, showing the map with an address selected, visually linking to all headstones that list it as the home address. — An address selected, visually linking back to all headstones that list it as the home address.