Six Degrees of Francis Bacon Awarded Coveted NEH Grant

cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2016/august/six-degrees-grant.html

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

By Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / shilo@cmu.edu

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon the interactive online tool that allows anyone to trace the personal relationships
among figures like Bacon, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and many others has received a coveted National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant.
The $325,000 Digital Humanities Award, one of 300 new grants announced, will allow the Carnegie Mellon
University and Georgetown University team to continue reconstructing Britains early modern social network,
improve the user experience, connect the project with other digital resources and work to permanently curate,
maintain and preserve it.
Because of limited humanities funding opportunities, the NEH awards are extremely competitive.
"NEH grants help bring humanities experiences to Americans across the country," said NEH Chairman William D.
Adams. "We need the humanities, now more than ever, because they give us access to the most fundamental and
consequential dimensions and forces of our experience."
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon identifies more than 15,000 individuals, highlights approximately 200,000
relationships and lets users view and add to the network. Since its launch in October 2015, the website has received
more than 40,000 visits.
It is an example of how digital humanists can use computers and technology to answer long-sought-after questions
and explore fields like literature and history in new ways. It is unique because it encourages professional

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researchers, students and amateurs to participate in the same community. And, at a basic level, it can give anyone
an immediate sense of historical networks and communities and help them develop more sophisticated
interpretations.
To create Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, Carnegie Mellons Christopher Warren, Georgetowns Daniel Shore and
CMUs Jessica Otis mined the 62 million words in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to map who knew
whom between 1500 and 1700. They relied on CMUs Department of Statistics and specifically the data mining
expertise of Associate Professor Cosma Shalizi and Ph.D. student Lawrence Wang to develop the visual social
network. The team collaborated with CMUs Raja Sooriamurthi, teaching professor of information systems, and his
undergraduate students to allow users to add research and knowledge.
"Chris Warrens work is wonderful and deserves to be supported by the NEH," said Richard Scheines, dean of
Carnegie Mellons Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. "Warrens work is solidly grounded in the
humanities, but he has embraced the 'digital' tools becoming available to amplify his own scholarship and to create a
community of scholars in the humanities, all of whom will benefit from these tools."
Understanding interactions from this period has numerous uses, including helping experts keep track of the many
associations and giving newcomers contextual information about relationships that are often difficult to access.
"If you are studying mathematician Isaac Newton and want to find out if he knew the poet John Milton or if youre
studying Quaker William Penn and want to know if he knew the philosopher John Locke, you can see those things in
an instant," said Warren, director of the project and associate professor of English in the Dietrich College. "Our vision
for 'Six Degrees' is humanistic inquiry thats at once more public and participatory than prior generations, and also
more accurate, useful and interconnected."
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon has been used in classrooms at Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown in various ways.
Students used the network to understand how early modern people were related, and they also added information to
the network based on their own research in the period. The team hopes that more classes take advantage of the
tools and information the site offers.
"'Six Degrees' is a terrific tool for use in the classroom," said Shore, associate professor of English at Georgetown.
"Not only does it introduce students to the people of 16th- and 17th-century Britain in an intuitive way, it also shows
them that they can make real contributions to knowledge based on their own research. By spending time with period
documents, students quickly gain the expertise to add and describe complex relations between people, enriching
our collective understanding of how early modern society was put together."
The NEH, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, is an independent federal agency that supports the best in
humanities research, public programs, education and preservation projects.
Related Articles:
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon Launches
Video: What is Six Degrees of Francis Bacon?
Carnegie Mellon Project To Mine Early Modern Social Network
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