Networking for Historical Justice: The Application of Graph Database Management Systems to Network Analysis Projects and the Case Study of the Reparation Movement for Japanese Colonial and Wartime Atrocities

Abstract

Using the reparation movement for Japanese colonial and wartime atrocities as a case study, this paper explores the applicability of graph database management systems to network analysis research and teaching in the field of digital humanities. Since the late 1980s, Asian victims of Japanese colonial and wartime atrocities (such as the infamous “comfort women” system) began to sue the Japanese government and corporations with the help of local and Japanese lawyers and activists. This paper uses the plethora of publicly available court materials produced by the movement to study social networks in this transnational historical justice movement and illustrate how graph database management systems can upgrade traditional network analysis methodologies in digital humanities. By inputting the data about lawsuits and lawyers in the movement into graph database applications like Neo4j and GraphXR, the paper demonstrates the advantages of managing network data in graph database structure in terms of scalability, modifiability, intuitive visibility, query efficiency, and analysis potential over relational database structure, which is the mainstream in network analysis research.

Keywords

• social network analysis
• graph database
• relational database
• japanese history
• visualization
• human rights
• reparation