Six degrees of Francis Bacon.

PositionSocial Media - Website overview

For more than a year, early modern literature and history nerds have had their own Facebook (minus the faces) that instantly links relationships among 16th- and 17th-century authors, politicians, kings, queens, theologians, and other luminaries of the period. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a digital project established by Georgetown (Washington, D.C.) and Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, Pa.) universities that re-creates the British early modern social network.

Georgetown English professor Daniel Shore worked with alumnus Christopher Warren and CMU's Jessica Otis--a postdoctoral fellow in Data Curation for Early Modern Studies --to map the network by mining 62,000,000 words in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Like Facebook, you enter a name, such as William Shakespeare, in a space on the website and up pops that person and all of his or her "friends" but, since this is serious scholarship, there are no selfies or videos of kittens attacking balls of yarn.

"Six Degrees is, naturally, aimed at academics, scholars of the literature, and historians of the period," Shore explains, "but we also have quite a few of what we call citizen scholars, who are, for example, interested in the court of Henry VIII and are able to take advantage of our site and contribute knowledge."

The site, which includes exercises and syllabi to get students involved, is being used in classrooms at both universities. Shore calls Six Degrees an "excellent way" to get students to play close attention to such figures in the distant past and view their connections to one another.

"We don't have beliefs in a vacuum; we don't write about one topic or another without the way we're positioned in society shaping our views, shaping our understanding of the world," notes Shore, a specialist on Paradise Lost author John Milton. "So, our relationships are not just a matter of who knew whom. They matter to our ideas, and the ways we make art. The kinds of contributions people made to the...

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