The DH project I decided to analyze was the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project. This project is a digital humanities project that seeks to provide a visible and interactive representation of the social relationships of early modern British history. It contains over 13,00 individuals and 200,000 relationships between figures like Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and others.
The source of this digital humanities project comes from a mining of the 62 million words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography performed by professors Daniel Shore and Jessica Otis to see who knew each other between 1500-1700. The project is open access and literally anybody can contribute to the ginormous relationship web as well, meaning that even you and me could participate in this digital humanities project. The processes offered by the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon and its original goal are to help people see in an instant the relationships of early modern Britain. If you ever need to see how one person may be connected to another during that time period, simply check the relationship web and you should be able to find what you are looking for. In terms of the presentation, the relationships are connected by a very intricate web. All people are represented by dots, with Francis Bacon being the largest dot as the origin. First degree connections are colored, small dots while second degree connections are shown as smaller white dots. Another interesting thing is that relationships are either represented by a gray line, which indicates a statistically inferred relationship, or a black line, which represents a human contribution of a relationship.
A question that arose for me is just how big could the web grow if we expanded the dates or changed the specific relationships we were looking for. Could we use this web to maybe find a connection between someone from the 1600’s and someone from the 1900’s or would that be very hard to do? I would be interested in seeing if an expansion of this project would be possible in the future.
I really appreciate your explanation of this project. What other information could we gather from this project do you think? I like how you point out that it shows the relationships between different people during this time in England. I think it’s really cool that all of these connections exist from just one person.