Blog 4 – Text Analysis and Network Analysis (Fraudy)

Context

The website I chose for this blog post is titled Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon is most known as a philosopher of science but, also has many other pieces of work that inspired some of the modern science seen in the 21st century.

Relations between the Nodes

As seen in the legend there are the labels origins, 1st degree, 2nd degree, Human Contributions, and Statistical Inferences these are used to connect all of the nodes to one singular origin even when all of them are not directly connected to the origin (Francis Bacon). The degrees and how they connect can be compared to a person writing an autobiography and then someone else writing about that person and so on hence the physical change of color opacity and size. The human contributions can be seen as direct contributions from Francis Bacon’s work or work inspired by Bacon and made into a different idea passed on to different nodes in the picture. The statistical inferences are educated guesses using numbers and stats to infer the connection between the different people shown in this picture.

Interactions

The interactive part of this website was seen as a basic necessity for this to work and the information on each individual node was marvelous. The effectiveness of this can be seen as information about each person can be accessed and read in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Jstor, and Google Scholar (These are just the homepages of the websites but, when clicked on the specific person it will link you the information for the person you chose) which is provided by the website. One downside I can see from this website is trying to find certain connections with a person, especially the not-so-well-known people in this information metropolis but, it is a greatly designed website in what they want to present to the user.