The project Six degrees of Francis Bacon is a digital reconstruction of Birtitan early modern society (1500-1700). Scholars and Students anywhere in the world “can collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique”(Six Degrees of Francis Bacon) the different relationships. The project is very much collaborative, the data established for the project essentially synthesizes the work of many scholars from many different sources.
The project’s data orginally started as wikipidiea of different libray authority identifties, it eventually turned into a wikidata- “a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.” They used the following external identifiers– Virtual Integrated Authority File, Virtual Integrated Authority File, International Standard Name Identifier, Library of Congress and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography– to match 421,000 people.
“Having such a wide array of identifiers in one place means that Wikidata is slowly becoming an effective “biographical spine”, tying together a wide range of different digital projects and allowing them to be cross-referenced without having to do the matching work individually for each pair.”
Introducing: Six Degrees on Wikidata-By Andrew Gray
With the establishment of Wikidata, the project Six Degrees of Francines Bacon was developed. .
The nodes of the network are historically significant individuals. The size of nodes is determined by the number of connections (degrees). As you can see from the legend, the nodes’ color indicates the relationship’s closeness. On the other hand, the edges have two distinct colors that reveal where the data was collected. The human contribution is user contributions while the grey lines are statistical inferences from-the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), a “preliminary list of 6000 actors and to infer, with confidence intervals, a map of the associations between them”(Six Degrees of Francis Bacon).