This lecture titled, “Networking for Historical Justice: Building the Graph Database of Reparation Lawsuits against the Japanese State for Colonial and Wartime Atrocities” is based on current research on graph database consisting of lawsuits and lawyers that made up the reparation movement for historical justice in Asia since the 1980s.

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 “Overview of Postwar Reparation Lawsuits,” 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 presentation will cover the basic concepts of graph database and network analysis, how to start building one from scratch with no coding experience, and potential teaching and research usages of these methodologies. Join the Department of History and the Asian Studies Program at FIU for this dynamic and interactive presentation.