You may have heard of, and if so probably by now forgotten about, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” A meme before the age of memes, it is older than some Daily Nous readers. Heck, Wikipedia describes it as a “parlour game.” No one has “parlours” anymore. Barely anyone has a “parlor,” even.

And yet, “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” kind of works, doesn’t it?

Regardless of the name, it’s a cool project:

Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University have created “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon,” a groundbreaking digital humanities project that recreates the British early modern social network to trace the personal relationships among figures like Bacon, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and many others. The website lets academics, students and anyone else interested in this period view and add to the network. The site currently identifies more than 13,000 individuals and highlights approximately 200,000 relationships.

That’s from the press release. You can check out the interactive project here.

What is your (Francis) Bacon Number?