Who it is for
iRelate is not built for everyone. It is built for the people who recognized themselves in the phrase “consciousness archaeology.” The work of careful preservation.
You are preserving not just what your grandmother saved, but the context she saved it in. The kitchen in the photograph, the recipe on the fridge, the voice note she made about the woman who taught her to cook. iRelate surfaces the connections you would have missed.
You have a working archive — but the grid view loses the recurring subjects, the geography, the references. iRelate makes your archive queryable, so you can ask “every photograph in this light” or “every subject who came back.”
A research database that understands context. Notes, sources, photographs, recordings, all of them connected. You can ask in plain language and get back the documents themselves, not just search hits.
You have inherited a hard drive, a box of photographs, a shoebox of letters. The people who could explain them are gone. iRelate is the tool you wish they had used — and the tool you can use to leave something behind.
Backups are not memory. A disk failure is not a setback; it is an erasure. iRelate treats your artifacts as durable, indexed, queryable — not as files in a folder.
Memory is not a list. It is a graph. iRelate is an experiment in what it looks like to take that seriously — for the first time, in software that ordinary people can use.