A Cliometrics’ View on the Garzoni Database

• In Event: Apprenticeship in Early Modern Venice: Extracting, Representing, and Exploiting Data from the Accordi Dei Garzoni

Abstract

The Garzoni project undertakes the study of apprenticeship in Early Modern Venice by exploiting the Accordi dei Garzoni, a document series from the Venetian State Archives consisting of about 55.000 apprenticeship contracts (1575-1772). The project revolves around two main steps with, first, the building of a database encoding the relevant information of the material and, second, the examination of such information. In this regard, historical studies can take several directions, e.g. the study of professional training, of apprenticeship as a form of labor, and of workshops. We present results from a first subset of contracts. We first highlights our solutions to common challenges of quantitative analysis on such records, whose information needs to be normalized. Then, we present results from regression analysis on salaries as a means to detect general or profession-specific trends. We finally expand on the printed book sector with a analysis of professional profiles and the crisis of the XVII century.

Author

• Giovanni Colavizza, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne