Six degrees of Francis Bacon is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network. You can see on this website that each notable person in early modern society is represented by a dot and the relationship between a pair of them is represented by a curve joining two dots. This website is called Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, but the user can type any person of interest on the top left side and the website will generate a network that includes all the people related to that person (1st degree) and all the people related to them (2nd degree).
The source of six degrees of Francis Bacon is a dynamic dataset and the builders also grabbed data from various sources. Presumably, once they got the chief figures, they started building a graph data structure similar to the one displayed on the website. When more figures are added to this giant network, they would add vertices and edges to this graph. This website had an interesting presentation that looks like a web. The user can drag each dot to see the details of relationships. More features including group search are also implemented.
This gets me thinking about whether the website should allow users to add data to contribute to this network. On one side, more data makes a more complex and thus more interesting network, but on the other side, users can also input malicious data and it seems hard to automatically filter them out.
Which academic fields (i.e history) do you see the project in conversation with?
I see that it is in conversation with lots of humanities subjects such as history, politics, and literature.
Who is the target audience? (i.e. specialists? a broader public?)
I think the target audience could both be the general public or the historians as there is a lot of freedom in which celebrities to include in the network.
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I think this site’s interactivity is what makes it possible to display so much data on one page. Using the location of the mouse to display more information or having small windows pop up with more info (like how each dot shows the connections when you click on it on this site) seems like the main way that many of these projects are made interactive. It makes them much more digestible.