For this reflective blog, I chose to analyze Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. This webpage shows a graph of Francis Bacon, the people he knew, and the people that those other people knew. The nodes in this graph are different people, and the edges are connections between people. Gray lines indicate a statistical inference, which means that these two people were connected by being in the same place at the same time, being associated through documented correspondence, or having familial ties. Black lines mean that a user manually contributed that connection and is vouching that the two knew each other.
In addition to being able to click on nodes to isolate them and view their connections, you can also sort by category. There are over 60 categories to choose from. Additionally, you can change the layout from hooke to concentric, which places one person in the middle and displays all of their connections. You can also search for people and view their individual or shared network.
Unfortunately, the sheer amount of data and categories results in a long response time from the website. As cool as the transition animation between networks is, it also adds a significant wait time and disengages the user. The individual and shared network panel on the left isn’t intuitive either, and the categories on the bottom get smushed so you can’t read them. The legend on the right, though, is super visually appealing and easy to understand. The graph itself is beautiful and, despite the incredible number of lines, not that hard to read! Overall, this tool is very effective for understanding the connections between people in this time period.
