Blog Post 4- Jacob Ventura

I looked through some digital humanities projects, but the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon network project caught my eye because of the simple and interactive user interface. One thing I am able to do is drag the different nodes to space them out how I’d like. This makes it easy to organize and visualize the data. I can also single people out and search for an individual network or someone in a shared network with that person. I think this is the most fascinating tool because it allows the user to only focus on certain people. There is an option to change the layout from hooke to concentric. The concentric view makes it easy to separate the 1st degree connections from the 2nd degree connections, as the 2nd degree people are on the outside of the circle. Lastly, I can search for members of different groups to visualize that. For example, I can view the Jesuits and their connections to others. This can be viewed in hooke or timeline.

In this network analysis, the nodes represent different people, and the edges represent the relationship between the people. The gray edges are people that are predicted to have had interactions with each other based on statistical inference. Black edges are user-contributed, where different people put in those relationships. I wonder if this can cause unreliability with the black lines. What people are inputting this information? Are they reliable? I also wonder what the statistical method of inferencing the relationships is. The relationships are categorized as first-degree and second-degree.

I noticed that King James I and VI had the largest circle, so I put him as the network to visualize. He has so many 1st degree connections that the network was too hard to read. Still, it was interesting to see the different people he knew.