Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com. Created by Carnegie Mellon University with support from the National Endowment of the Humanities. Current website maintained by John Ladd, David Newbury and the Density Design Lab including Paolo Ciuccarelli, Tommaso Eli, Michelle Mauri and Michelle Invernizzi. Reviewed Feb. 8, 2019.
The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon visualizes an imagined historic social network of the sixteenth century surrounding Francis Bacon based on crowdsourced historical documents. This project can lead digital humanists and historians to askew questions based on the visualization of the data provided by these relationships. These relationships have been inferred statistically by datamining entries from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon expanded this project, inviting new collaborators to join a January 2016 Networking Women Add-a-thon to focus on adding women who were not originally included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The program website uses network analysis which provides a solid foundation although there are still many questions to answer about how projects such as this can be as inclusive as possible. Most of the researchers and collaborators work for Carnegie Mellon and this project did not really seem to open this project to a larger collaborative effort which could have been a missed opportunity. While the website communicated the basics of the project, I needed to search the site’s blog for deeper answers about how the project was put together and organized. With its design, I felt that a more intuitive narrative would have been helpful in describing what the web of relationships could mean. I also do not believe that this website is as friendly to mobile devices, because it’s hard to see the layer of relationships on a small screen.
The audience for this project is digital humanists and scholars looking for new perspectives on how to use primary and secondary sources to determine possible social networks of the past. This project does an excellent job of communicating to digital scholars who understand network analysis. However, it does a poor job of educating those without a background in this field how to use and understand this tool. As a digital media tool, this website provides a new way to visualize information and to consider new questions. This is not something that could be done in another format and so it does move the digital humanities forward as we come up with new ways to perfect the details of network analysis.
While this project provides a good start for network analysis, the website and blog have not been updated since early 2018. This is a missed opportunity for continued engagement of how learning from this project can further advance our questions about who knew who centuries ago and how that might have affected events in the past. Overall, I rate this project a solid B, and I’d encourage the site to work to remain relevant and active in the digital age leading the cause of uncovering new questions for the digital humanities.
