Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Crowdsourcing and Social Network Analysis

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) is a digital humanities project reconstructing the social network of early modern Britain through a combination of statistical analysis of texts and crowdsourcing.  In the first stage of our project, we statistically analyzed the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to infer the existence of historical relationships.  We then used those inferences to construct a preliminary social network of over 13,000 early modern figures and 170,000 relationships.  In the second stage of our project, we constructed a website that enabled us to both display our preliminary social network and open the network to crowdsourcing.  Through this website, we are incorporating additional data to validate, expand, and categorize our social network.

This poster will explore the features and findings of SDFB as a crowdsourced network analysis project.  It will illustrate features from the SDFB website that have been designed to encourage scholarly interactions with and contributions to the project, such as network visualization filters and tabular data downloading capabilities.  It will also diagram the project's current relationship and group ontologies, which have been designed to be extensible in order to maximize the site's interoperability with other scholarly projects.  Lastly, it will exhibit our latest findings from statistically analyzing the social network as it evolved over the course of the website's first year of operation, with particular emphasis on the ways crowdsourcing has altered - or failed to alter - the characteristics of the preliminary social network.