Project: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network that scholars and students from all over the world can collaboratively expand and revise however they want to. This project can synthesize the work of many scholars and the new work on the network is put into immediate relation to previously studied relationships. This website is hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Libraries.
Who or what are the nodes and what are the edges? In this project, the nodes represent all the people with whom Francis Bacon could have gotten in touch in person during his lifetime. The Origin node would be Francis Bacon himself and the 1st degree 2nd degree would be the different degree of separation with him. All nodes have different colors and sizes of nodes indicating the degree of separation. In terms of the edges, it seems like the edges are connecting the parent node or the sub-node of its child and there are no edges that connect the different nodes that are at the same level. However, this could simply be because my observation was not good enough and few edges connect them and possibly represent the connection between them.
How are the relationships characterized and categorized? In this project, the relationships are characterized and categorized by people who have gotten in touch in person with the parent node. The very first node or the Origin node is Francis Bacon and the node after him is called the first-degree node. These people are all someone that has been in touch with Francis Bacon before. Then, the third node is called the second-degree node and they are people who have been in touch with the person that have been in touch with Francis Bacon is the first-degree node.
What interactions does the project allow? In this project, I was able to click on each node to filter that node and its node that is connected by edges and make all the other nodes invisible. This was very cool since it will be convenient if you want to learn about a specific person and its connected nodes. In addition, the website includes a search box to search for the person you want to learn about.
How does this impact their effectiveness and/or your engagement? This project was very engaging to me since if I were to look at what kind of person Francis Bacon has been in touch with, without the network graph, it would have been a simple spreadsheet or a very long list of names. However, the graph allows us to easily visualize how connected these people are and the huge graph with multiple nodes and edges grabs our attention.
