Providence’s rich history — stretching from the pre-revolutionary period to today — can be found in the 110 acres of North Burial Ground, where more than 100,000 people have been buried over the last 300 years.
Yet as the tombstones — and the stories engraved upon them — begin to deteriorate over time, the cemetery is at risk of losing this history that predates even the founding of the country, says Annalisa Heppner, the city cemetery director.
Through the Community-Engaged Data and Evaluation Collaborative, Heppner and North Burial Ground staff have partnered with Jordi Rivera Prince, a presidential postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, to preserve the cemetery’s history by documenting and digitizing the burial ground’s tombstones and handwritten burial logs.
First established in 2023 as a two-year pilot program, CEDEC “leverages Brown University’s resources to address the data, evaluation and research priorities identified and valued by nonprofits and public agencies in Rhode Island,” wrote Dan Turner, the assistant director of the initiative, in an email to The Herald.
CEDEC’s partnership with North Burial Ground was born when Turner reached out to Heppner about the cemetery’s needs and asked how Brown’s resources could help the burial ground accomplish its goals.
“Those headstones are really the only record of the cemetery at all, from 1700 to 1848, so it’s really important that we keep up with them as they deteriorate over time, which all stones do,” Rivera Prince said.
The need for documentation arises not only from the weathering of tombstones, but also because the city did not officially document burials in the cemetery between 1700 and 1848. But even after North Burial Ground began keeping records in 1848, the burial logs were largely handwritten, making many of the records difficult to access for the public.
“A lot of the tombstones are made of marble, and marble does not react well to pollution,” said Rivera Prince. She added this issue is compounded by the cemetery’s location next to the I-95, which sees excessive car emissions that exacerbate the weathering of the tombstones.
With a group of 14 students, Rivera Prince and her team go to the burial ground multiple times a week to collect data about the tombstones and digitize handwritten records with the help of an artificial intelligence tool.
According to Rivera Prince, students also do archival work, including uncovering the history of individuals from Hardscrabble, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Providence during the 19th century. In 1824, the neighborhood was subject to racially motivated riots that led much of the community’s history to be forgotten.
For Allyson Frisbie ’26, an assistant field technician supporting the research, one of the most valuable aspects of the project is preserving the memories of those buried in cemetery.
“If this project didn’t exist, we probably would have just forgotten” about them, Frisbie said.
Blanca Payne ’25.5, the student lab manager, shared Frisbie’s sentiment about the value of saving parts of Providence’s past before it is too late. She also believes that making historical burial records publicly available is “part of the duty of a public institution like North Burial Ground.”
According to Turner, CEDEC assists community organizations by supporting data collection and visualization, “organizing new or existing data (and) building out data collection protocols,” among many other steps.
The initiative has partnered with five Brown courses that aim to support “R.I. community partners’ data priorities,” Turner wrote.
One of these courses is DATA 1500: “Data Visualization and Narrative,” where students learn the basics of compelling storytelling through data visualizations.
“You can analyze a bunch of data and get a really interesting finding, but that doesn’t matter at all unless you can actually communicate your findings to other people in an effective way,” said Reuben Fischer-Baum, the course’s adjunct lecturer and a senior data editor at Yahoo News.
For their final projects, the 25 students in DATA 1500 will use publicly available data and the skills they’ve learned throughout the semester to tell a compelling story about a topic of their choice. While the course was first offered in spring 2024, this semester is the first time students have been able to pursue projects through CEDEC, and two students have chosen to collaborate with data partners.
Laura Romig ’25, a student in the course, is working on creating data visualizations for the Rhode Island Center for the Book, a nonprofit organization that provides free books to institutions throughout the state.
Romig’s project is focused on “demonstrating the impact and spread of (the Rhode Island Center for the Book’s) past and current work in Rhode Island schools and libraries, as well as helping them determine how to expand their reach,” she wrote in an email to The Herald.
As a comparative literature concentrator, Romig wrote that she was interested in helping the organization “grow literacy and increase appreciation for reading and writing (among) Rhode Island students.”
While CEDEC was originally launched in 2023 as a two-year pilot project, the initiative has expanded to support over 50 projects this spring, involving over 100 students and 15 faculty and staff. These projects have been crucial to support the needs of many community organizations by bringing the resources Brown has to offer to the table, Turner wrote.
“Most of the students who engage through CEDEC have not previously worked with RI community partners before, so it’s been a fantastic way to apply the skills they learn at Brown in meaningful, local ways,” Turner added.
Jonathan Kim is a senior staff writer covering Science and Research. He is a first-year student from Culver City, California planning to study Public Health or Health and Human Biology. In his free time, you can find him going for a run, working on the NYT crossword or following the Dodgers.
