Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University have collaborated to create ”Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.” The project aims to recreate the early modern British social networks between 1500 and 1700 to trace the relationships among figures like Bacon, Shakespeare, and Isaac Newton.
Sources
The data were initially collected by mining more than 60 million words from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In addition to the dictionary, another source of data is users; the website is constructed to allow users to contribute to the project by adding new information such as people, relationships, and groups. Since this is an ongoing project, the amount of data has been growing over time and currently, the site maps more than 200,000 relationships between 13,000 people.
Processes
As mentioned above, data mining was used to collect data, and researchers used them to create a network graph. Since the project focuses on data visualization, no additional analysis has been done.
Presentation
A network graph is used to map who knew whom between 1500 – 1700. In the graph, a node represents an individual, and an edge represents connection between two nodes (two people) that share it. In addition, the website allows user to focus on specific individuals/groups (see the image below).
Overall, I really enjoyed exploring this project! I’m currently working on my stats comps on network analysis, so maybe doing some quantitative analysis of this network would be interesting.
We gave our posts the exact same title! Lol
I missed that they got the data from the National Biography, that’s an interesting detail. I’m also curious what kind of analysis you’d do on this dataset; it seems like there should be some interesting possibilities but I can’t think of anything right now.