Blog 4 – Network Analysis (Arlo Cornell)

Overview

The digital humanities network project I chose to analyze is the “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.” It exists on a webpage hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, and it was developed by a group of professors and staff at the university (and strangely helped out by one guy from Georgetown–good for him). The impetus for the project is the idea of “six degrees of separation” that any two people on Earth can be linked together via no more than six individual connections of mutual acquaintances. That concept was then popularized by the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” which posited that Kevin Bacon can be linked to anyone else in Hollywood via no more than six connections of shared movie appearances. This explains the DH project’s name and its focus: What if we applied the six degrees of separation to Francis Bacon rather than Kevin?

What (or who) are the nodes and what are the edges?

Francis Bacon was an English chancellor, politician, and philosopher who lived in the 17th century, and he is the central node of the network. The other nodes are relevant historical figures around the same time period, including King James I and Queen Elizabeth I. There are hundreds of figures of varying degrees of historical significance, each present to try to form new connections all beginning at Francis Bacon. The edges of the network are the relationships between two given people in the network, though the project doesn’t always concern itself with the nature of the relationship–it just ensures that they’ve at least met somehow.

What interactions does the project allow? And how does this impact their effectiveness and/or your engagement?

The project has an amazing level of interactivity, complete with easy connections to future research. When you click on a node, it shows a very brief description of the person including when they lived and died, but it also links you to the OxfordDNB, JSTOR, and Google Scholar pages for the historical figure. Likewise, when you click on an edge, you can see more information about the nature of the relationship, including, most relevantly, the percentage confidence that these two individuals ever met. The website also distinguishes between statistically inferred chances of meeting and researcher-entered information.