Nodes and Edges!

Alice K Cutter
Sun, 02 Oct 2022 21:57:45 +0000
Uncategorized, Week 3, Reflective Blog Post

In order to further my understanding of different Digital Arts and Humanities projects I examined Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. The project seeks to explore the social connections between different people in Early-Modern Britain.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon uses graphs (edges and nodes) to construct a social network. Each node (circle or dot) is a person. The size of the node represents how many connections with other people they have. Very large nodes are King James I and VI as well as Queen Elizabeth I. Beyond color, nodes also have different coloring patterns. Nodes that are solid orange are one degree of separation away from Francis Bacon while white nodes are two degrees away. The lines between the nodes (edges) represent a social connection. The lines that are colored black come from user-contributions and the gray edges are statistically inferred connections.

One of the many exciting features of the project is that you can sort the graph by different groups. For example, if you wanted to learn more about Diplomats, it’s easy to see everyone who was a diplomat and just their connections between each other. Diplomats is an intriguing example because while there are a number of nodes in the graph, the graph itself is quite sparse meaning there are not a lot of connections. This is quite different to the Lord Admiral’s Men who (according to wikipedia) were a theatrical troupe where there are considerably less nodes but of those existing are much more connected.

The project was created in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library and Carnegie Mellon University. It was a collaborative effort from digital humanist, historians and computer scientists. The project used data-mining techniques to comb through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in search of connections between people. The project was originally designed to model the social connections of Early-Modern Britain but grew into a project that addressed larger questions such as: how to effectively convey uncertainty in scholarship, and how to bring together people with diverse backgrounds to collaborate on the project.

A final thought that the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon left me with is how do we do projects like this one but about people who have historically been left out the narrative? It seems like having a base of written information like the National Biography database is incredibly important for creating similar projects. So when there is less written about certain groups where does that leave Digital Arts and Humanities. If we base projects off of previously written material how do we move forward when there is existing unrepresented groups?