The project I looked at for this week was Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. The project is about Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who was an English statesman and philosopher. He was connected in some way to many major figures during the Early Modern period. The project showcases the social connections of the period through their connections to Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon was a well connected man whose connections varied from philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, playwrights like Shakespeare, to the monarchs James I and Elizabeth I themselves. The nodes in the project are people of the Early Modern period and the edges are the social connections between people, who knew each other and so forth. The project allows you to sort between different groups of people, such as the translators of the King James Bible and Elizabethan playwrights. It also allows you to view individual social networks, which reveals just how large the project is. Some of the royal networks are absolutely massive, like this one of Queen Anne Boleyn:
You can also do shared networks and see what connections two individuals had in common, which I think could be very revealing. Something I thought about when we were learning about these network analysis is how useful it could be for historical sources in general. I saw one that was the social network of Socrates which was absolutely huge, as he was a central character in many of the dialogues produced in 5th Century BCE Athens. I think it would be interesting to do that sort of analysis on other figures in Athens at that time, since most of the “major players” in Athens at the time all knew each other, and going through time it would be interesting to go a few degrees further and see just what happens. I mean off the top of my head I can come up with some interesting relationships, like take Aristotle. He was taught at Plato’s academy. Plato had been taught by Socrates. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. Just there we get to Alexander from Socrates in 3 connections. From Alexander you get each king of the successor states. You can basically connect most of the rulers of the Eastern Mediterranean at one point to Socrates in about four connections. I think that it would be really interesting to do and to visualize.
