Contents |
Orlando contains a relatively large corpus, currently consisting of details about the life and writing careers of roughly 1000 British women writers, amounting to 6.8 million words with 2.2 million semantic tags for everything from paragraphs to politics, plots, or relations with publishers. The Degrees of Connection project is an early experimental attempt to leverage this textbase for use by researchers who are interested in studying the network of connections between writers.
To trace a connection between Ella Baker and Frances Harper through organizational affiliations, choose the two names using the controls on the left, then select the radio button for “organizations”. The proximity choice and exclusions list underneath the “Linked by” choices are there to reduce the number of connections that may not prove to be very useful. Most British women writers, for instance, spent some time in London, so connecting them by places other than London is likely to be yield more interesting results.
There is a page describing Degrees of Connection here: http://entry.tapor.ca/?id=24
The Orlando Project was led by Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, and Susan Brown at the University of Alberta and the University of Guelph. The 6 degrees research team also includes Blair Nonnecke (Guelph), Claire Warwick (UCL), and Stan Ruecker (U of A).
Brown, Susan, Jeffery Antoniuk, Sharon Farnel, Isobel Grundy, Stan Ruecker, Matt Patey, Stéfan Sinclair, and Milena Radzikowska. “Making Sense of Literary History: The Dense Associative Web of Orlando.” Paper presented at the third Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) Colloquium. Nov 1–3, 2008. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008.
Some theory about connections is available in: Barabási, Albert-Lászlo. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002.
Online, with account by arrangement with Susan Brown.