I decided to look into the project ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’ hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. It is an interactive visualization of the social networks between people in early modern England around the time of the Elizabethan Era. This virtual map is centered around Sir Francis Bacon, politician, philosopher, and prolific letter-writer. Examining the map, we can see other focii, such as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I and VI, and Anthony Bacon, a spy, among others.
Besides its striking visual design, this project is remarkably interactive. By clicking on an individual, you can make a different person the central focus of the map, and see how the connections and degrees of separation rearrange themselves.
The website contains an ‘About’ section that links to a blog with information about the project, but the map itself contains relatively little information about the people in the map; case in point, the caption for Anne Bacon, “gentlewoman and scholar” is distilled to such a degree that it isn’t very helpful unless you’re already fairly familiar with influential British court figures in the 16th and 17th centuries. The project seems like it would be most useful to specialists hoping to get a better sense of the social networks between the era’s most powerful or well-connected public figures.
Nevertheless, the website has been featured in a variety of publications aimed at the general public, like Mental Floss and the Smithsonian Magazine, probably because of the smoothness and attractiveness of the user interface. The map could really enhance the understanding of amateur historians, students, or history buffs and encourage them to go and seek out more information about names they don’t recognize in the map.
‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’ also makes an effort to make its data and methodology transparent and more generally accessible through linking to its data on Github and to a tutorial on The Programming Historian that walks readers through “exploring and analyzing network data with Python.”
