Weak Ties and medieval social networking

Back in November I blogged about Medieval social networking and the reconstruction of the map of social obligation in pasrt of medieval southwest France.

Now most of these relationships were commercial transactions - weak ties - and thus really what was graphed out was a map of social obligation.

So, by arbitrarily scoring (ie weighting) various relationships do we find some sort of double donut - a ring of close relations and an outer ring of acquaintances and a degree of fuzz round the edges - something that is quite different from the Kevin Bacon connectedness diagrams that show only the connections, not the relationship status ...