Basics
The nodes are different historical figures and the edges are connections between them. Francis Bacon is the largest origin point, so most of the connections are based on their relationship to him. Additionally, one can easily spot “hubs” in the visualization, which typically indicate extremely important English historical figures like Queen Elizabeth I and King James I and VI. One can also spot political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and family connections to Francis Bacon, like Anthony Bacon (Francis’ brother). The visualization allows you to click on specific nodes to view their most immediate connections. When clicking on a node, you can also view the specific period they lived in and find sources related to that historical figure on JSTOR, Google, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The project also includes a legend on the right that distinguishes between two different types of connections– the first connections to Francis Bacon and 2nd connections (the connections of connections to Francis Bacon).
Creation
The project was created by several Digital Humanities and experts in English Literature. They are Christopher Warren, a professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, Daniel Shore, professor of English at Georgetown, Jessica Otis, a Digital Humanities Specialist at the University of Virginia, Scott Weingart, a Library Program Director of Digital Humanities at Carnegie Mellon, and John Ladd, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon. The site’s codebase is Angular, a frontend Javascript framework, Ruby on Rails, and D3, which are all available on Github. They additionally used R for network inference of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Many computer programmers were used to create this network instance code.
4 thoughts on “The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon”
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You can also change the point of origin. you can look at six degrees of William Shakespeare or six degrees of King Henry VIII, which I guess just proves that they have a lot of data available to draw conclusions from and analyze.
Why was the frontend combined with so many types of coding? Were there combined aspects of the code on one single page? The node profile page is very cool, though. It reminded me of the project I looked at. Were the links and data clickable at all? This type of connection seems to be very versatile, as you could adopt the connections for many different figures, even if you have to have a big dataset for relationships.
I think the discussion or idea of hubs is interesting in general for any network, but especially this one. While this is a project focusing on Francis Bacon, the hubs can tell us a lot about influential people adjacent to Francis. I guess it’s important to note that our networks don’t have to be so centered on one node and often the best ones focus on many nodes.
I really appreciated your approach to relaying how the database was created and the website was formed. That information is super useful when considering how the data can grow and change as new information is added to the system. Also, I also find it so cool how Francis Bacon specifically knew very notable individuals, such as Queen Elizabeth I, and how that impacts his extended connections to people so drastically.