Prosopography Now

No one who knows me needs to be informed that I'm socially deficient. The fact that I participate at all in social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, is somewhat contradictory, but I have my reasons, driven mostly by curiosity. Actually, I was also at one time a fan of Usenet groups, but I fear they've become almost obsolete, and listserves, which still seem to be hanging on to some extent. In all of these social arenas I tend to be more a lurker than a contributor, but that's perhaps matter for a different posting. My subject here is personal networks or group relationships. I've chosen the term prosopography because it's a wonderful word for such things, and comes from classical rhetoric, which was once my field of study.

Actually, prosopography, both the word and field of study, is of fairly recent vintage, but the root word, prosopopeia or prosopopoeia was the rhetorical term for the figure of speech that represents an absent person as though he or she were present and speaking. It's a version of personification and comes from prosopon, the Greek word for mask or face, which is sometimes also translated as person. Prosopography is the study of persons who may be absent, or about whom we may have little specific personal information, who have left few historical traces, but whose personal histories and characteristics can be inferred and recreated from evidence through their relationships and associations with other people, or their social networks. I don't know that this definition would pass muster with a real prosopographer, but you get the idea. You can learn a lot about people from studying the people they know and interact with.

Genealogists know about this sort of thing. Let's assume you're interested in some early ancestor, but you don't have much to go on other than a name and a few dates. The next step in your research will likely be to find out not just more about your particular John or Jane Smith, but also more about that ancestor's family relationships. You want the John Smith married to Elizabeth Jones, the ones who got married in Birmingham, England, in 1879. If you are lucky enough to find that much, now you can extend your research to include information about others in the family groups. And if you're really serious, you'll probably extend that to include others from the same community, and by a process of comparison and study and elimination of obvious false links in these personal relationships, you can determine whether the John or Jane Smith you're interested in is the same as the ones you've been finding information for in various records, archives, and databases.

Historians often do the same sorts of research. In the past, they would have been mostly interested in famous historical figures. Scholars have been combing through records for ages now looking for traces of William Shakespeare. And as it turns out, they've found out quite a lot. But what they don't know about that specific boy from Stratford upon Avon, they've filled in by what they know from his family and other associations. Now, admittedly, you will never convince someone who believes that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon that any of this proves anything. But if you're the sort of historian who wants to know more about what it was like to be someone like Will Shakespeare growing up in a little town like Stratford in sixteenth-century England, you can actually learn a great deal from this kind of prosopographical research into Shakespeare's family and social network, as well as more specific information about particular individuals in that network, and their relationships to others in other overlapping networks of social, and political, and economic relationships.

Obviously, the more data you have the more you can learn about individuals, even when specific records are sometimes lacking. Suppose we want to know what books Shakespeare read in school? Well, since he didn't leave us any diaries or personal testimony, we're going to have to find other means of answering this kind of question. But there are records, school records from similar Elizabethan schools, diaries and testimony from others: contemporaries, teachers, school officials from other similar schools. In order to know more about Will Shakespeare and his family, it helps to know more about all those other people in his social networks. And that's just the sort of thing scholars and historians have always done. That's why they spend so much time visiting archives, and public records offices. But with the advent of the Internet, and the digitization of so much of this kind of personal information, the scale and potential for such research has grown enormously. Scholars can almost re-create sixteenth-century Stratford, or a digital facsimile of it.

Now let's jump forward to the present. They may not call it prosopography, but there are a lot of folks out there making use of all our data that's now online and the growing amount of personal information from our social networking and searching habits. If scholars can re-create sixteenth-century Stratford, how hard can it be for Google and Facebook to re-create 21st-century people in all our multi-dimensional facets of taste, opinions, and consumer preferences? You can lurk, but you can't hide. It's just the nature of data accumulation. And while we may try to mask ourselves with icons and avatars, prosopography is the art of looking behind the mask and identifying the person. We are, like it or not, the sum total of our social networks. We're known by the company we keep. Of course much of the information about us will be inaccurate, even distorted by our random acts of browsing and friending, but in the end none of that will really matter. A portrait will emerge from the data, and for all digital purposes we'll become that person we've created online. That's prosopography now.