It’s an all too familiar story: “Oh! You know Bobby? My cousin’s friend’s sister’s niece’s roommate’s brother is on the same baseball team as him!” Academics are guilty of this too, Mathematicians like to quantify their Erdős Number as a fun way of learning about how their work connects to the larger network of math academia. Along the same lines, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a fascinating website that aims to describe the social network of Francis Bacon, its name a reference to the theory of “six degrees of separation,” which posits that any two people on Earth are on average, socially connected by six or fewer people.
This network works by initializing a vertex for each person to be kept track of in the social network, and an undirected edge is created between any two vertices in which the people represented by the vertices have met, or are otherwise acquantited with one another. In traditional graph theory vocabulary, a degree is defined as the number of edges that a particular vertex has connected to it. In this website, however, a degree instead refers to the number of vertices away from the central vertex (in this case, Francis Bacon) that a given vertex is. For example, anyone to which Francis Bacon is a friend would have a degree of one, a friend of a friend would be two, and so on and so forth.
The website allows one to search for and highlight another vertex within the network (William Shakespeare, for example), to see the exact overlap of the two individual’s social networks, and the exact “paths” of people that one can take to get from one of these vertices to the next. Interesting and somewhat to addicting to explore in its own right, I am also extremely interested to see how this type of network can be used to answer questions in sociological research; graphs are a heavily studied structure in mathematics and computer science, I’m fascinated to see if these previously discovered results could potentially lead to answers in fields once considered disparate.
This is neat, I looked at this project a week ago for another assignment. It’s interesting to think about the differences in analysis between the two, you’re focused more on how the network looks while I think I was talking more about the interactivity and the features of the public-facing site.
I did this project for the same assignment, and I knew the idea felt familiar but was unaware that It was the theory of “six degrees of separation”. Thanks for that info!