Prosopographical network

A prosopographical network is a system which represents a historical group made up by individual actors and their interactions within a delimited spatial and temporal range. The network science methodology offers an alternative way of analyzing the patterns of relationships, composition and activities of people studied in their own historical context. Since prosopography examines the whole of a past society, its individuals who made it up, and its structure, this independent science of social history uses a collective study of biographies of a well-defined group, in a multiple career analysis, for collecting and interpreting relevant quantities of data, these same set of data can be employed for constructing a network of the studied group. Prosopographical network studies have emerged as a young and dynamic field in historical research; nevertheless, the category of prosopographical network is in its formative, initial phase and as a consequence it is hard to view as a stable and defined notion in history and beyond social network analysis. See also narrative network.

With the advent of the study of complex systems, graph theory provides analysts of historical groups and collective lives with relatively simple tools for answering questions such as: how many degrees of separation on average separate all members of the prosopographical group? Which historical character is connected to the most other members of the studied range? How densely or loosely connected was the group as a whole? Such questions hold a natural interest for prosopographers, who can then begin to look for certain characteristics –class, office, occupation, gender, faction, ethnic background – and identify patterns of connectivity that they might have otherwise missed when confronted with a mass of data too large for normal synthetic approaches. The concepts and methods of social network analysis in historical research are recently being used not only as a mere metaphor but are increasingly applied in practice

The analysis and interpretation of prosopographical networks is an interdisciplinary field of study in social studies and humanities. This field emerged from philology, history, genealogical studies, and sociology and social network analysis. The term "prosopography" comes from the word prosopoeia, a figure in classical rhetoric in which an imagined person is figured and represented as if present. Claude Nicolet defined the main of prosopography as the history of groups as elements in political and social history, achieved by isolating series of persons having certain political or social characteristics in common and then analyzing each series in terms of multiple criteria, in order both to obtain information specific to individuals and to identify the constants and the variables among the data for whole groups.

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