Graphic detail | Digital humanities

Where nobleman and knave meet

By E.H. and K.N.C.

IN THE print edition this week we look at “Kindred Britain”, an amazing digital humanities website that traces relations between 30,000 British people. Is it possible to resist frittering away hours in front of the computer screen while examining the remote relatives of George Washington (originally British, of course) or the literary friendships of Mary Shelley?

The project harnesses data about the ties among people in an innovative way. Historical individuals are presented as dots connected to each other on a network map. Colour-coding suggests how figures are linked, say, by marriage or profession. Rolling over the dots brings up a wealth of information about the people. A scrolling timeline across the bottom of the site lets users skim through the ages. A map of the world lets people scan by geography.

With 897m connections to be traced, Kindred Britain provides not only hours of intellectual entertainment, but is an example of how academics are embracing big data and sleek infographics to reveal insights about culture and the spread of ideas. The viewer can uncover inter-relationships that even the historical personages themselves probably never knew.

The project is led by Nicholas Jenkins, an English literature professor at Stanford University. The website is designed along principles of a family tree. Yet unlike in other attempts to map relationships, Kindred Britain doesn't flinch from the messiness of the real world. Bigamists, same-sex marriages and illegitimate children are included. Thus the site traces connections that were previously obscure. And by pouring resources into the presentation of the information over the web, “digital humanities” projects such as this makes academic research far more accessible and publicly available than before.

And so David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, is distantly connected with Charles Darwin, the founding father of evolutionary theory. Novelists across the centuries are linked by marriages between their descendants: Jane Austen, who never married or had any children, is linked to both Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. Poets, in contrast, are more likely to be related to one another. The only disappointment? When we searched the last names of some of our colleagues, we came up empty-handed.

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