Good news, from Roland Piquepaille over at ZDNet…
According to Nature News, a team of French researchers has used medieval documents to create the oldest detailed social network ever constructed. The mathematicians and computer scientists looked through thousands of records of land transactions dating back as far as 1260 in a Southwest part of France.
Makes me wonder why I did not come across it earlier. Oh, right, because they titled the paper Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis. Shame on you French Scientists, don’t hide the good stuff.