Elevating "Everyday" Voices and People in Archives through the Application of Graph Database Technology

In a simple experiment using a graph database we demonstrate that it is possible to increase the number of access points to individual items in archival collections. We do this by leveraging existing machine readable and searchable data and metadata to identify and display relationships between persons, places, dates, events, etc. across items and collections. We discuss some of the financial, ethical and representational implications of decisions made in applying technology to archival holdings. Many decisions are made without considering the ethical and representational implications. Our experiment has illustrated some of these ethical and representational implications.