In 2010, two English professors — Christopher Warren of Carnegie Mellon University and his pal, Daniel Shore of Georgetown University — were sitting in a Los Angeles bar when they came up with a great idea.
“We said, how awesome would it be if there were a Facebook of the past, and so we set about doing it,” Mr. Warren recalled.
The result is a new website called Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com), covering the social network of well-known Britons who lived between 1500 and 1700. You can go to the site, plug in the name of a historic figure and get a graphic image of the “two degree” relationships involving that person — that is, everyone he or she knew and everyone those other people knew.
The website was a collaborative effort of Mr. Warren, Mr. Shore, CMU postdoctoral student Jessica Otis and statistics experts at CMU, who developed computer algorithms that were able to comb through the voluminous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and calculate how many times other people were mentioned in each biographical entry and determine how strong those relationships were. The site contains the names of 13,000 people and reveals 200,000 relationships, and the roster is constantly growing because other scholars can add names and biographical information to enrich the network.
The site is a play on the popular parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players try to connect any actor to film star Kevin Bacon, using no more than six acquaintances in a chain. Mr. Warren said he has no idea whether Kevin Bacon knows about the scholarly version of the relationship game or is descended from Francis Bacon.
But the historic Mr. Bacon, who lived from 1561 to 1626, was well-connected in his own right, Mr. Warren said.
He is probably best known for his early advocacy of the scientific method — the idea that scholars should do experiments to find out how natural phenomena work and keep testing the limits of human knowledge. He is also favored by some as the person who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays, although the evidence for that is scant.
But he was much more than an ivory-tower thinker and writer, Mr. Warren said. “Francis Bacon is at the center of all sorts of things in early modern Britain: He’s a lawyer, he’s a scientist, he’s a natural philosopher. He’s involved with colonial projects and mining projects and he’s got his fingers in everything.”
He died of an infection at 65, which tradition says was brought on by his experiments in seeing whether he could delay putrefaction in a chicken by stuffing it with snow.
On the website, primary relationships for each historic figure show up as blue circles, while those with lesser or weaker connections show up in red or orange circles. There are two reasons his team used the more eye-catching hues for the weaker relationships, Mr. Warren said.
First, the people who show up in red or orange might be good candidates for further research. “I think there are dissertations to be done here.”
Second, many of the red and orange nodes belong to women. Men dominate the official biographies in those centuries, so the red and orange circles help emphasize the importance of women in that society. To enhance that emphasis, CMU is holding a workshop Jan. 23 called “Networking Early Modern Women,” which is intended “to equip participants with the time, training and motivation to add women and their relationships” to the Six Degrees site.
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon also helps promote an idea that British poet John Donne expressed: “No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
“Too often,” Mr. Warren said, “we have this sense that all these historic stories are their own stories, so that there’s a history of science, a history of Shakespeare, a history of civil wars, but really, these histories involve people who went to school with each other and exchanged letters with each other and borrowed ideas from each other. So Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is very much aimed at helping us reconnect branches of knowledge.”
That approach complements what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography itself tries to do, said its former editor, Lawrence Goldman. The dictionary, which now covers 55,000 lives and contains 65 million words, tries to show the connections among historic figures. “Although the biographies are of individuals,” he said, “we recognize that history is not made by individuals alone. Our job is to make it easier to understand the place of a life in history.”
“It’s hard to truly understand a person’s life unless you understand the people he knew — that X had breakfast with Y and traveled by coach to Oxford with Z,” said Anthony Grafton, a Renaissance scholar at Princeton University and a fan of the Six Degrees site. Allowing other scholars to add names to the site only makes the web of relationships denser, Mr. Grafton said, “because nobody knows as much as the hive mind.”
As a result of this crowdsourcing, Mr. Warren said, 300 people have already added names and biographical details to the Six Degrees site. One recent example: Someone has begun to add the names of the wives of early colonial leader Myles Standish. “We have this picture of the pilgrim fathers and they get the most attention,” he said, “but if you think of how society actually functioned, you cannot ignore the role of women.”
Mark Roth (mroth@post-gazette.com) is a Post-Gazette staff writer.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a brilliant thinker whose voracious, wide-ranging mind, combined with a strong dose of ambition, kept him at the center of British life and politics for most of his adulthood.
While Bacon was appointed learned counsel by Queen Elizabeth I, he was denied higher office, possibly because he had resisted some of the queen’s tax proposals. The attorney general’s job under Elizabeth instead went to his rival, Edward Coke, and to add insult to injury, Coke married Bacon’s intended, Lady Elizabeth Hatton.
Bacon’s career ended in 1620, when he was impeached for taking bribes in cases he adjudicated. Historians say Bacon was a scapegoat for anger over King James I’s granting of lucrative monopolies to favorites.
Edward Coke: Angered by Coke’s opinions that the monarch was subject to law, James I removed him from the bench in 1616, after which he became a leader of the opposition in Parliament and pushed to limit the king’s ability to grant monopolies. As part of that dispute, Coke led the bribery inquiry that resulted in Bacon’s impeachment.
King Charles I: The son of James I was executed in 1649, after a civil war against Parliament. Coke led early opposition to Charles’ powers, and the monarch’s enmity was so great that even as Coke was dying at 82, the king’s agents ransacked his offices and confiscated manuscripts.
John Milton: The author of “Paradise Lost” also was famous for political writings opposing the powers of the monarchy and supporting Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.
King James I: After Queen Elizabeth I died without an heir, James became the ruler of Scotland, England and Ireland. Literary and cultural life flourished, but he had continual struggles with Parliament and conflict with Roman Catholics.
Oswald Tesimond: While not directly implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a group of Catholics plotted to blow up Parliament and kill James I, the Jesuit did know about the plan and later gave religious comfort to the conspirators. He escaped to Europe, pretending to be the captain of a ship of dead pigs.
Guy Fawkes: Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot conspirator discovered in Parliament’s basement with 36 barrels of gunpowder, was executed. Guy Fawke’s Day, celebrated each November, has morphed from an event with anti-Catholic overtones to a general excuse for lighting bonfires and setting off fireworks.
William Rawley: Rawley became Francis Bacon’s chaplain and helped prepare his papers for publication. After Bacon died, Rawley published Bacon’s remaining works. He later was appointed chaplain to King Charles II.
King Charles II: The son of Charles I fled to Europe in his 20s during Cromwell’s Protectorate. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, Charles regained the throne in 1660, a period known as the Restoration.
Sir William Penn Sr.: During Cromwell’s tenure, the well-known naval leader led an expedition to the Caribbean that was supposed to capture present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti. While that invasion failed, he successfully repulsed Spanish soldiers at Jamaica, leading to the British influence that continues to this day. Penn later helped organize the flotilla that fetched Charles II home from Europe.
William Penn: William Sr.’s son was a talented businessman in Ireland when he became a Quaker. When Penn was granted a royal charter to colonize Pennsylvania, he saw it as an opportunity to set up a ”holy experiment“ with full religious inclusion.
First Published: December 27, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
