Case Study: Vanderbilt University achieves breakthrough digital humanities insights with Neo4j

Vanderbilt University - Customer Case Study

Vanderbilt University Libraries’ Linked Data and Semantic Web team, led by Suellen Stringer-Hye, needed a way to analyze and surface relationships in digital humanities collections—like Flannery O’Connor’s correspondence and artist genealogies—that were hard to model with traditional relational databases and earlier topic-map approaches. The challenge was making complex metadata explorable and meaningful for researchers and library staff.

They loaded spreadsheet metadata into Neo4j, used graph queries and visualizations to explore connections, and made the system usable via a sandbox-style UI. The graph approach revealed surprising insights (for example, the sheer volume and reach of O’Connor’s correspondence), lowered technical barriers for staff, and enabled new projects and analyses, demonstrating how graph databases can augment humanistic research.

Vanderbilt University

Suellen Stringer-Hye

Linked Data and Semantic Web Coordinator