The network analysis project I chose to explore is “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.“ Francis Bacon, a renowned philosopher and politician, served as England’s Lord Chancellor from 1618 to 1621. Widely regarded as the Father of Empiricism, Bacon is best known for his contributions to the philosophy of science, which is essentially the study of scientific methods and implications.
This network analysis is an open and collaborative web project hosted by Carnegie Mellon University that seeks to map Bacon’s extensive social network/ the early modern social network in general. The project visually expands outward from Bacon, with nodes representing individuals in his network. The color and outline of each node indicate their “degree of relatedness” to Bacon, categorized as first or second-degree connections. Edges depict the relationship between individuals- with gray edges signifying statistically inferred relationships and black edges representing user-contributed data. This layered visualization provides a dynamic and interactive way of understanding the complex relationships between the individuals.
This project does a very good job of linking to all resources used to develop this network map. For each node, clicking on it reveals a brief description of the individual’s occupation/importance accompanied by a series of links to scholarly sources and biographies. Additionally, the biography data is available for download, making it easy to access and analyze further if needed.
The interactive component of this network analysis is particularly intriguing. At first glance, the layout gives the impression of a 3D graph that you could rotate 360 degrees, however, this isn’t the case. Instead, the nodes are movable, allowing users to rearrange them and visually organize the relationships between individuals. This arrangement feature is engaging and helpful, but also somewhat misleading because the initial setup when you open the webpage looks like it’s a 3D model.
One thing I do wonder about is how the validity of these sources and edits is ensured, given that this is an open web project where anyone(although the about page does specify “scholars and students”) can contribute. Perhaps this meticulous linking of resources serves as a safeguard, allowing users to independently fact-check the content and assess its credibility. This transparency is great but also at the same time having to fact check everything as perhaps and independent researcher seems very farfetched given the amount of data on this page.
