“Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” is a project developed within Carnegie Mellon University, coordinated by Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, aimed at reconstructing existing social networks of scholars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 2017 DensityDesign Lab was involved in the re-design of the visual interface for the exploration of this network.

Given the richness of the underlying data, rather than providing a single view on it we preferred to identify several points of views useful for the analysis and understanding of the topic, as we did in our previous research Lomen. To identify such views, we started from an analysis of the actions performed by humanists on the previous interface, identifying possibile tasks to enable through our visualizations.

During a week-long sprint at CMU we co-designed with the data experts the views for the new interface, iterating over prototypes made on a sample dataset

The resulting interface was then finalised and realised by DensityDesign Lab, and finally implemented in the interface in collaboration with the researchers from CMU.

You can see the results visiting the website:

sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com