The Digital Humanities project, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, focuses on the visual representation of the social network relating to a significant historical figure, Francis Bacon.
The large and complex diagram contains several nodes and edges distributed across the graph. Each node, or vertice, contains the data of and represents one individual with some connection, whether distant or close, to Francis Bacon.
The legend for the graph further explains the visual data shared through each node and edge. The nodes become larger and more vibrant for each degree closer to Francis Bacon, our origin. The edges also have distinctions, where the light grey reflects an edge that was statistically inferred, whereas a darker edge was contributed to the database through a human report. The primary information available with each node includes legal names, birth and death years, and occupation.
We learn more about the creation of the database on the “About” option of the navigation at the top of the page. The project was highly collaborative, with members of the team behind it being from various disciplines such as English, Mathematics, and Digital Humanities.
The data is sourced from either human contribution or statistical inferring, and the data is an ever-changing resource that may be altered and expanded as new data is discovered. The more new data is discovered, the larger and more complicated the graph will become; therefore, more inferences may be determined as more information is present.
3 thoughts on “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A DH Reflection”
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This network clearly contains more information than the one I analyzed, namely the fact that the degree of separation have six different levels and also whether the connections are statistically inferred or obtained from human report. Aside from carrying these information, the visual helps the reader: making the nodes bigger or small and of different colors to represent the degree of separation obviously serves as an aid, enabling the user to quickly get an overall idea of the network. But I was wondering: are we truly able to distinguish amongst the six different colored/sized nodes? If yes, I wonder how more degrees can the human eye perceive.
This network shows how individuals are connected to each other, but I do think it could have benefitted from more interactivity. Specifically, I feel that if there was a way to learn details about their connection in some way, it would better help understand the social relationships being shown in this network.
This project might be the most visually appealing network example I have seen (without minding some of the clustered edges) However, I would like to know how social relations can be sourced from statistical inferring. What does this entail? Were the human contributions passed through some sort of algorithm or does it mean that because a group of people coincided at the same place and time, they were statistically likely to have a connection?