Francis Bacon is everywhere. That’s what the website “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” shows its viewer through a huge network of thousands of vertices which connect him to not only the queen of England, but Thomas Hobbes and Julius Caesar! A spin-off of “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” this website uses data-based inferences and crowdsourced data to find all the major connections, both primary and secondary, that sir Francis Bacon had. The creators also even color-coded each of the edges to show whether they were based on these inferences or if they were user-contributed. Each of these edges represents someone meeting another person and their proximity to Bacon (dark orange representing Bacon and each node getting lighter orange the farther away the person is. The map is also extremely interactive, allowing users to sort by particular groups, visually single out relationships or series of connections, and change the layout of the web in various ways such as turning it into a timeline to show when people existed at the same time and could have met. Overall, a very cool project. I hope they do Jesus or one of the roman emperors next.
