Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
I'm sure you're familiar with the game, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." You know, the one where you think of any other actor and try to work your way back to Kevin via movies with combinations of actors. So... Rutger Hauer has a Kevin Bacon Number of "3," because he was in "Blade Runner" with Daryl Hannah, she was in "Splash" with John Candy, and John was in "JFK" with Kevin. I've enjoyed this game for years, and have speculated that the single best reason to have an Internet at all is as a host for IMDB, which helps scratch this itch when you just can't quite figure out on your own how to get back to Kevin.
Well, WorldCat has a feature that I tend to refer to as the engine for playing "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon." Officially, it's called WorldCat Identities, and its built into WorldCat.org.
Let's say you're looking at the record for a work by Mr. Bacon; Essays and New Atlantis. If you click on the "Details" tab, you'll see an "About the Author" section with a link to Francis Bacon. Click there, and you go to the "Identities" page for him. Take a look... the page has a timeline of publications by and about Bacon, links to his most popular works, and a tag cloud of related subjects. The purpose of WorldCat Identities is to have just such a summary page for every name in WorldCat.
The game portion of our program comes into play with the "Related Identities" section near the bottom. These are people and/or characters that are closely related to the identity you're viewing. So, of course, Shakespeare is related to Bacon. Click on the link to Shakespeare's page, and you'll see a list of related identities. Now... only the top 10 Identities get shown. So I tend to start working on my own at this point.
You can go to a main search page for all Identities here. And I know that Shakespeare wrote about the historical character Cleopatra, so let's see what her Identities page looks like. Interesting... Elizabeth Taylor! So Liz has a Francis Bacon Number of "3." (Taylor to Cleopatra to Shakespeare to Bacon).
Being able to connect millions of authors, characters and groups (like the Beatles) through their links into library materials is a different and (for me) fun way to explore subjects I'm interested in.
