Negotiating social relations in collective and affiliation-based networks

Social relations are usually negotiated within a collective structure. In general, actors belong to social units or take part in social events where pairwise interactions (individual to individual) are over-simplistic. Nonetheless, current historical network analysis relies greatly on this type of interaction. Instead, we investigated interactions between individual and collectivities, employing affiliation networks, and how these interactions affect the former. Our goal was to provide a better understanding of the societal structure of the past, and consequently, of how things like ideas, concepts, and knowledge could flow on social networks, by considering collective structures.