Dec. 2 — Most of us have heard about the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, based on the “six degrees of separation” concept, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart.

Now, there’s a similar game in town: Who knew whom in Renaissance Britain?

This is the question that the project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon seeks to uncover. “We’re leveraging 21st century computational methods in order to illuminate the past,” said Christopher Warren, associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Computational methods include using techniques such as machine learning, graph inferences, and web development to reconstruct and communicate the social networks of early modern Britain from about 1500 to 1700.

Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University researchers, including Warren, Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Scott Weingart, Cosma Shalizi, and Raja Sooriamurthi created this digital humanities project to look at big historical data to see how often names are mentioned together in the history of scholarship as a way of modelling social networks.

Their work is published in the July 2016 edition of Digital Humanities Quarterly.

“Our website allows scholars, students, and citizen humanists to improve the network — that is, add relationships to validate some of the inferences that we’ve made, and in many cases to reject some of the statistical inferences. This means that over time we get a more accurate representation of the social networks of the period,” Warren said.

In essence, Warren and his colleagues take the history of scholarship in so far as it’s been digitized and run it through algorithms to see how often any two names have been mentioned together. The machine learning aspect then finds ways to model these past relationships. The hope is to find a model that accords with what they’ve learned through years of study and helps extend their knowledge to new networks.

Trying to understand the historical context of the major literary and artistic works and ideas that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries is no easy feat. The 200-year period that brought us the Reformation and the scientific method also brought us Hamlet, calculus, and the microscope.

“The only way you can understand any of these things is by understanding the context from which they emerge. If we want to understand how we got something like Paradise Lost or the separation of church and state, it’s going to require us to pay attention to who knew whom and how ideas spread, and the ways in which our modern world is in crucial ways a function of historical social networks,” Warren said.

Take, for example, the relationship between authors William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. People have long supposed that Shakespeare and Marlowe existed in the same milieu and more than likely knew one another. But what scholars are finding now based on internal analysis of their work is that they were more than likely co-authors. In the new Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, which will be available this month, Marlowe will be credited as such.

This is precisely the kind of finding that can be integrated into Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. As scholars find more examples of relationships, they can go to the website, add them, and see them integrated into the most current picture of scholarly knowledge.

“In our case, we inferred because Shakespeare and Marlowe’s names often appear near one another that they probably knew one another at a 75 percent probability,” Warren said. “Recent evidence seems to confirm this, so we can bump that confidence up to 100 percent and have an even better picture of the past.”

A project like this generates tons of data.

So, in July 2016, Warren and his colleagues became users of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) to help them analyze the data and to expand their data sources.

“We’ve primarily been working with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), which is the gold standard of British lives from the Roman Empire to the present. Much of our initial work is with that corpus,” Warren said.

But they needed more sources to verify the validity of the relationships they had found. They are now expanding with help from XSEDE’s Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). David Walling, the ECSS expert at TACC, is helping them see if the process they used on the ODNB can be extended to other corpora such as historical journals.

The entire article can be found here.

---

Source: Faith Singer-Villalobos, TACC