Six degrees of FRANCIS BACON: Interactive relationship maps shows ‘friends of friends’ for historical figures
Link to article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3276520/Six-degrees-FRANCIS-BACON-Interactive-relationship-maps-shows-friends-friends-historical-figures.html
On the 9th of October, the Professors spoke about 6 degrees of separation, and then I looked online to find an interesting correlation about this topic. I came across an article that wold have created a social network (interactive map) between historic figures from the 1500 – 1700s. This study highlighted 13,000 persons of interest and more than 200,000 relationships among them.
The article would examine if Shakespeare or Bacon had a facebook account, who and what would show up on their newsfeeds. This could potentially reveal whether Shakespeare had the resources necessary to plagiarize/steal other plays for himself. The site is named the 6 degrees of Francis Bacon and it was created by looking through dictionaries and encyclopedias such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and extracting connections of who knew who from that 200 year span of time. They mined around 62 million words looking for clues about potential relationships which we would call “nodes”. FYI Francis Bacon was known for “creating” and verbalizing the scientific method.
This site was created by Carnegie Mellon University and here is a diagram that depicts the social groups of Shakespeare and King James of House Stewart of England
An example of what was learned from this tool was that John Milton, a British Poet, did not only associate with other poets. He in fact interacted with a lot of composers, musicians, and British royalty through the likes of British singer Henry Lawes.
By default, the tool exposes only 2nd degree connections, which are essentially friends of friends. The people with the most connections are dark blue and those with very few are greyed out. King James was the main connection between Shakespeare and Bacon and can be seen in the diagram/closeup of the tool below.
