Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a large web-based project in digital scholarship devoted to research in the early modern social network centered on the English philosopher, politician, and Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626). The website is hosted by Carnegie Mellon Universities Libraries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The main feature of Six Degrees is a large, interactive network visualization of Bacon’s professional social connections, as well as relationships of higher degree, showing who was connected to whom, as well as the professions (lawyers, writers, philosophers, musical composers, etc.) of connected individuals. The network therefore provides an intuitive approach to studying social connections in early modern Britain. Each node of the network represents an individual connected to Francis Bacon in some way, through a direct connection or through higher degrees of separation. The edges (links), representing the connections, are colour coded as either statistically inferred or as a human contribution. The visualization can be zoomed to display different resolutions, enabling a detailed study of smaller social networks as well as broader overviews. It also contains rich content and hyperlinks. Clicking the nodes of the network visualization displays information on that person, including a timeline and hyperlinks to additional information on the individual from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, JSTOR, and Google. The graph can also be filtered by criteria chosen by users by clicking buttons on the bottom of the display window. The categories include “Diplomats”, “Judges”, “Benefactors of the Bodleian Library”, “Historians”, “Spies”, and “Painters”, among many others. Additionally, each individual represented by a node has their own network, which can be subsequently filtered by the categories of people connected to them. It is a collaborative project, synthesizing contributions from scholars and students worldwide who can “expand, revise, curate, and critique” it. The project is also interoperable. New contributions to the network are integrated into the network based on previously studied relationships.
The interoperability of Six Degrees is enabled through metadata. One of the ways in which metadata empowers the project is through the concept of a controlled vocabulary, an important concept in library and information science. It is an organization of words and phrases used for indexing and searching. Controlled vocabularies include both preferred and variant terms within a specified domain. They address issues of linguistic homography (in which words with identical spellings have different meanings, such as “lead” ([n] the chemical element or [v] the antonym of “follow”) and polysemy (in which words have multiple senses, such as the verb “to get”, meaning “to obtain” or “to understand”), as well as synonymous words and phrases (in which different words have the same meaning, such