Blog Post Week 6

The network project that I chose to investigate was Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. In this project, the network represents the early modern social network via connections to Francis Bacon, who was a philosopher, politician, and lord chancellor from 1561 to 1626. Each of the nodes in this network represents a singular person during this time period, and the edges represent a connection between the two people, such as having met them, being employed by them, being friends of them, or being related to them. The edges are also color-coded such that the black edges represent information contributed by users (since this project is open-source) and the grey edges represent connections that are statistically inferred. This project allows you to interact with it by dragging around specific people to more clearly see who they connect to and compare but also has its own algorithm that sorts connections such that groups within the network are near each other and makes those with lots of connections have bigger nodes so that it is easier to see them. Additionally, by clicking on the nodes and edges, you can read a short description of each person and also see why each person is connected to another, which allows more specificity in the connections. Additionally, each edge gives information about the time periods that the two people were connected, and gives the confidence interval that this connection actually existed. To create this network, it appears that the authors coded most of the network themselves using a variety of languages including Angular, Ruby on Rails, and D3. They have a publically published Github that allows the public to see the code for the project as well. For data collection, it appears that they coded programs in R that are also published publically which helped them go through the data and sort it for their use for this project.