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

This is an ongoing project to digitize reparation lawsuits against Japanese colonial and wartime atrocities (most famously the \"comfort women\" system and Nanjing Massacre) into a graph database. Information about the lawsuits is taken from publicly available sources such as the 日本戦後補償裁判総覧 (http://justice.skr.jp/souran/souran-jp-web.htm), digitized, processed, and exported as cypher codes executable by graph database management or processing systems such as Neo4j. The database seeks to not only preserve historical materials produced in this transnational movement but also aid academic research and teaching of it. The project explores the applicability of graph database management systems to network analysis research and teaching in the field of digital humanities. By inputting the data about lawsuits and lawyers in the movement into a graph database, the project demonstrates the advantages of managing network data in graph database structure over relational database structure, which is the mainstream in network analysis research, in terms of scalability, modifiability, intuitive visibility, and query efficiency. The all-plain.cypher file can be loaded into graph database systems like Neo4j (https://sandbox.neo4j.com) to generate the database. The all data Kineviz-graphxr DATE.graphxr file can be loaded into the web-based graph visualization and processing tool GraphXR(https://graphxr.kineviz.com/register) with an account.