Reading Hard-to-Read Gravestones (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Reading Hard-to-Read Gravestones (2014)

organizeyourfamilyhistory.com

78 pointsvinnyglennon25 comments

While straight digital manipulation may not work as well (colors/contrast based) - those with newer phones can use the 3d depth sensors to do this without any extra tools May have to turn your phone around so the face / depth sensors face the stone, but I just tried this with Scandy (free tool) and it totally works. Pretty cool!

Scandy: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scandy-pro-3d-scanner/id138802...

If you want to do this optically just shoot a flashlight across the surface of the stone, hills and valleys of even less than 1mm in height or depth will create shadows revealing most of the otherwise hidden text. But hey, I bet we can get a startup to do this with a only a few million in round A seed money.

Love it, very clever and neat trick that I'll hopefully remember should I encounter this problem.

Something people could try with a cellphone, some image processing sw and a cloudy day is to video the gravestone while spinning a light around it to capture the relief

This being HN I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to train a neural net to read hard to read gravestones and made an app.

There are really clever applications for aluminium foil that I never thought about. Here it is used to prevent sticking of hot plastic to existing parts of a model:

https://youtu.be/6hW_FbsEG4A?t=446

For those new to geneology, https://www.findagrave.com/ is a great resource for finding grave locations and viewing photos of tombstones.

A clever approach. I thought a bit of digital manipulation would solve the problem but after a few tries, it turned out not so simple, though.

You can't read these things head-on because the information is in the depth. Looking at them obliquely helps a lot. If you want a fancy (and non-intrusive) technological approach then 3D laser scanning is probably the way to go.

Could the iPhone depth sensor be used for this purpose? Could an app be made?

The current top comment on this post claims that you can in fact do that.

Poster only links to an app for depth scanning, but it would be really cool if somebody with an iPhone near a grave yard would jump out and share some scans with us :)

(Obviously I’m too lazy)

Forgive my ignorance, but would an ipad pro with lidar have sufficient technology to produce a readable facsimile?

I think another approach would be a piece of paper and a crayon or such. I'd be reluctant to carry around a bunch of aluminum foil for this purpose, but paper and crayons feels a bit less wasteful to me. I imagine the environmental cost would be less (though I could be wrong about that)

I think the worry would be about how much a paper and crayon wears down the stone underneath (which the article alludes to with gravestone rubbings).

A damp sponge on top of aluminum foil still isn't contact-free, but I would guess it to be less of an impact than rubbing with a crayon. (It is also way more efficient to recycle aluminum compared to paper or wax).

Surely because aluminum is extremely energy-intensive to extract from ore, not because its recycling process uses significantly less energy than paper recycling?

IIRC almost all aluminum foil comes from recycled aluminum whereas most writing paper is virgin paper so the energy comparison is between aluminum recycling and paper manufacturing. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but my impression is that paper manufacturing is quite energy-intensive as well.

My bet is that recycled aluminum wins out.

In my family's plot there is a 100+ year old stone that's never been readable in my lifetime. We were always curious. Recently visiting now with kids, it dawned on me standing there that we could rub it with one of their crayons. It worked INCREDIBLY well. The unreadable stone was now clear as day on the paper.

Any thoughts if it is appropriate to replace worn stones?

No idea. It is informative, though, for people to have a good idea about how long their monument will last. It's not forever!

From the article:

>The downside is that, unlike gravestone rubbings–which I learned are harmful to the gravestone–it’s not easy to keep and store foil rubbings.

Ah yeah, I saw that but I wasn't sure what they meant by "gravestone rubbings" since you can also use pencil, chalk, charcoal... and not even necessarily paper either, so it was kind of ambiguous to me. I guess any of them might cause some slight degradation of the stone though, presumably...

Of course, you can take a picture of the foil rubbing.

If one thinks it might be nice to leave a transcription for the next people who wonder about the stone, try something like:

https://www.nationalband.com/2702-write-on-tag/

Which he states.

Seems like you should be able to smooth out and reuse the foil, but perhaps not.

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