This is a data set of marriage and business ties among Renaissance
Florentine families. The data is originally from Padgett (1994) via
UCINET and stored as a network object.
data(florentine)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families (person aggregates) collected by John Padgett from historical
documents.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 two relations are business ties (flobusiness -
specifically, recorded financial ties such as loans, credits and joint
partnerships) and marriage alliances (flomarriage).
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. Both graphs provide
vertex information on (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).
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