In 2012, Google launched a tool to help you determine a celebrity’s “Bacon number”—the number of degrees of separation you are from Kevin Bacon. (The internet is pretty swell, isn’t it?)
Well, now a team from Carnegie Mellon University has created has created a website to help us figure out an entirely different kind of “Bacon number”: It shows users the various connections between the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon, and his early modern friends.
Cheekily called Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, this website actually goes far beyond its namesake; it’s a visual representation of Britain’s enormous social networks between 1500-1700, tracing relationships between figures such as Newton, Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth.
The site currently shows around 200,000 relationships between more than 13,000 early modern Brits—most of which were personally discovered by Georgetown University’s Daniel Shore, and Carnegie Mellon’s Jessica Otis from the 62 million-word Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. However, other people can and have added their own research to help grow this network; it’s a sort of early-modern British Wikipedia.
Researchers rejoice!
The sheer size of Six Degrees of Francis Bacon clearly makes it an invaluable resource, both for students, scholars, and bored office workers with internet access alike.
“Are you researching Anne Boleyn to find out if she knew Thomas More, author of Utopia? Now, you can see that in an instant,” said project director Christopher Warren, associate professor of English in Carnegie Mellon University, in a press release. “But not only that, you can see all of the people they knew, thus giving you new ways to consider communities, factions, influences, and sources.
“It’s critical for scholars because even experts have a hard time keeping so many relations in their heads. Meanwhile, newcomers have nearly instantaneous access to contextual information that’s often really difficult to access.”
The team especially hopes that college students and classes will take advantage of all the site has to offer.
“‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’ is, perhaps surprisingly, an excellent way to get students to pay close attention to texts,” said Shore. “Every early modern document is a record of complex relations between authors, printers, publishers, booksellers, dedicatees, polemical opponents, and so on. Students can often add to the social network just by studying the relations documented in the title page and front matter of a single 16th-century book.”
—–
Pictured is Sir Kevin Bacon. Image credit: Thinkstock
Comments