This is a data set of business ties among
Renaissance Florentine families. The data is originally from
Padgett (1994) via UCINET and stored as a network object.
Breiger \& Pattison (1986), in their discussion of local
role analysis, use a subset of data on the social relations
among Renaissance Florentine families (person aggregates)
collected by John Padgett from historical documents. The
relations are business ties (flobusiness - specifically, recorded
financial ties such as loans, credits and joint partnerships).
As Breiger \& Pattison point out, the original data are
symmetrically coded. This is acceptable perhaps for marital
ties, but is unfortunate for the financial ties (which are
almost certainly directed). To remedy this, the financial
ties can be recoded as directed relations using some external
measure of power - for instance, a measure of wealth.
Vertex information is provided (1) wealth each family's net wealth in 1427
(in thousands of lira); (2) priorates the number of priorates (seats on
the civic council) held between 1282- 1344; and (3) totalties the total
number of business or marriage ties in the total dataset of
116 families (see Breiger \& Pattison (1986), p 239).
Substantively, the data include families who were locked in a struggle for political control of the city of Florence around 1430. Two factions were dominant in this struggle: one revolved around the infamous Medicis (9), the other around the powerful Strozzis (15).
data(florentine)Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994) Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
Breiger R. and Pattison P. (1986). Cumulated social roles: The duality of persons and their algebras, Social Networks, 8, 215-256.
flo, network, plot.network, ergm, flomarriage