For this blog post, I decided to explore the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon network DH project. In this project, the nodes are representative of people, specifically people that Francis Bacon has a connection to. The size and color of the node indicate how separated that specific person’s connection is from Francis Bacon. The edges represent some sort of relationship or connection between two individuals on the graph. Gray edges mean that the relationship is statistically inferred, while black edges are from user contributions.
There are a lot of interactions that this project allows the user to perform. When opening the website, the user is given a view of the entire network. The user can use the mouse to click and drag to traverse around the graph. Additionally, they have the ability to zoom in and out of specific parts of the network. The user can also isolate singular nodes by clicking on them, which will remove all other nodes that the node is not directly connected to. A box will also appear that provides a timeline describing the years that individual lived, along with their occupation. There are also filter features on the website, such as at the bottom of the screen where the user can hover their mouse over an occupation, and only individuals of that occupation will remain on the graph. I feel that these features were very beneficial for my engagement as I found myself spending a lot of time exploring the different filters, and it was a very straightforward process to find specific information.
The project is currently hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. Scholars and students from all over are able to contribute and revise the project, so it seems that the graph is often changing. I found that the codebase for the website utilizes Angular, Ruby on Rails, and D3. The creators also offer users the opportunity to download the code from their GitHub repository. Finally, in the About section of the project, they mention that they use text mining and network inference on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to extract information and connections for the network.
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Your blog post provides a clear and engaging overview of the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project. I appreciate how you highlight the interactive features and data visualization techniques, making it easy to understand its scholarly value.