Prosopography: on the question of periodization of the application of the method in historical research

The method is an intelligent machine for the production of knowledge. I.D. Kovalchenko ^[1]

Prosopography is extremely popular in historical research, and during its century and a half of development within the framework of historical science has gone from a research method to an independent interdisciplinary direction.

However, to date, the history of the emergence and evolution of prosopographic problems and tools, its periodization remains as little studied.

This material, which is an abridged version of one of the chapters of the monograph being prepared for publication, is intended to fill this gap by offering a summary of the history and historiography of prosopography, as well as its periodization. 

The origin and content of the term "prosopography"

The term "prosopography" (sometimes prosopography; prosopography, prosopography) is formed from two Greek words: "person, person" (, prosopon) and "I write" (, graphos) and is notable for the fact that the noun in it is in the plural – prosopa ("people, persons"). Thus, the term literally translates as "I write about people" ^[2], which emphasizes the collective nature of the object of research.

Currently, the term "prosopography" means:

- a research method that allows us to study dynamic changes occurring in a certain period of time with a group of objects under study that have at least one common characteristic. This method is widely used in various disciplines, not only in the humanities;

- formed by the end of the XX century . interdisciplinary research direction ^[3], in which "collective biographies" of social groups and strata are created and studied in a historical context (Approx. author: in the foreign historical tradition, prosopography is sometimes characterized as an auxiliary historical discipline).

There are two interpretations of the term "prosopography" in the historiography of historical research.

The first one is usually associated with the tradition of historical and biographical research initiated by the French writer Antoine du Verdier in the work "Prosopography or description of famous personalities from the creation of the world with their portraits" (1573). In this work, by "prosopography" du Verdier meant biographies of specific persons, set out according to the same logical scheme and published in the form of a collection-dictionary, in which there was no analysis of the general characteristics of the group of characters studied by him. The numerous biographical encyclopedias and reference books that followed this first biographical dictionary, lists and registers of officials, etc., which were actively published throughout Europe in the XVII–XX centuries and continue to be published to this day, played their outstanding role, becoming the forerunner of meta-sources (databases) of analytical prosopographic studies, the central task of which was the formation of a coherent and a consistent biography of a particular person by compiling information about him, gleaned from various, sometimes "deaf" sources.  

This understanding of the term "prosopography" survived until the XXI century, when a similar type of prosopographic publication [sometimes with elements of reconstruction of biographies of specific studied persons – approx. the author], but without analytical procedures to identify their common characteristics, is successfully developing in German historical science, exists in domestic and foreign historiography within the framework of the direction of "intellectual history" ^{[4, 5]}, in the form of thematic archival databases ^{[6, 7, 8, 9]} or network resources ^[10].

The second, younger interpretation appeared in the middle of the XVIII century. and implies the study of groups of people in the context of identifying their common social and political traits and characteristics ("analytical ("quantitative") prosopography"). The famous American historian and sociologist L. Stone mentioned the implementation of the first such study in 1743 ^[11]. The further use of this understanding of the term "prosopography" in scientific works of the late XVIII – early XIX centuries is considered in detail by the English historian T. Barnes in the book "Prosopography Modern and Ancient" ^[12]. In particular, he notes that the dictionaries of the XIX century. the word "prosopography" is explained as a technical term indicating the presence in the publication not only of individual biographies of characters, but also descriptions of formalized general characteristics of the social groups that these people belonged to.

In the second half of the XIX century, the term "prosopography" became increasingly used to refer to collections of materials consisting of primary sources (questionnaires / questionnaires) and lists of different groups of people, to which (lists) additional summary information was attached, obtained on the basis of processing (including statistical) primary data of questionnaires.

This composition of research elements (questionnaires / questionnaires; the formation of samples (groups) of people with similar characteristics, the description and interpretation of summary data and the design of its results) since the end of the XIX century. It is the main content of the original prosopographic research method and its stages.

During the twentieth century methods of initial information gathering and processing has undergone significant changes in connection with the development of computer techniques and technologies; increased number of raw materials by attracting a mass of sources, changed the composition of the studied social strata, groups and strata (from "prosopographie ruling elites" to "quantitative prosopographie "ordinary people"), and prosopographic method became popular not only historians, but also political scientists, sociologists, cultural studies, and even the bibliography, and geneticists. So, for example, in the early 1920s, the founder of the Bureau for eugenics at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Yu Filipchenko used this method to study the mechanisms of formation of the intelligentsia ^[13], analysis of the heritability of scientific talent and impact on the environment and genetic factors; and after 30 years one of the leading American sociologists of the mid XX century. R. K. Merton suggested that prosopographia is a way of connecting the history of science, science studies and the sociology of science ^[14].

These changes and the active use of the method of specialists neighboring disciplines did not affect the purpose and content of the actual historical prosopographie, the definition of which in 1970 was formulated by the French historian Claude Nicolas: "prosopographia – the study of the history of groups of people with certain common political or social characteristics, defining constants and variables for individuals and groups as a whole, and subsequent analysis of each group as elements of the history of a particular country and the state ^[15]".

The idea of Nikola K. was supported by American historian L. stone, who in his work 1972, wrote that "prosopography is the study of the common background characteristics of a group acting in the history of individuals through a collective study of their lives. The method used is to create a universe, you need to study, and then ask a series of common questions about birth and death, marriage and the family, social background and inherited economic status, place of residence, education, size, and source of personal wealth, occupation, religion, work experience, etc. and Then different types of information about people in the universe are compared, combined and examined for significant variables that are checked on the internal correlation, and correlation with other forms of conduct or action ^[16]".

Unfortunately, this definition of stone less well-known and widespread than is given in the same paper definition related to sociology: "prosopographia is the study of the General characteristics of the group acting in the history of individuals, which deals with two main problems: 1) ways to exercise political actions; 2) the ways and options for social mobility and achieve their career aspirations".

In the 50 years since the publication of the latter definition was made a substantial amount of research that has proven its narrowness and one-sidedness with respect to the historical perspective ^[17]. A huge role in redefining the meaning of the term was played by the employees of the computer Centre in the Humanities at king's College in London (now the Department of digital Humanities (CCH/DDH)), Karl F. Werner and Professor K. Keats-Rohan, Peru which belongs to the modern definition of prosopographie, recognized worldwide for:

"The term prosopographia refers to the method of research, which is structured biographical information relating to individuals, forming a well-defined group, are investigated to identify constants and variables, which determine specific characteristics of the group as a whole and determine that it is unusual or abnormal. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis (mixed methods), prosopography is an interdisciplinary tool, based on sources, to analyze the historical processes at various levels, including the political, economic, social and cultural ^[18]".

Developing this definition, and drawing on the work of Nikola K. and K. Werner, Keats-Rohan said: "Prosopographia was identified as an independent science, social history, covering genealogy, the names and demographics. As he wrote to Werner ^[19], prosopographia allows you to combine political history of people and events with a hidden social history of long-term evolutionary processes. Much of this hidden history is revealed by identifying government positions occupied by the subjects of prosopographic study, therefore, prosopographia also has a direct relation to the history of institutions. In short, prosopographic analysis deals with man, his environment and his social status, that is the person in the context of family and other social groups, places or places in which he was active and the functions that it served as the society. ^[20]".

In a brief review of the history and development of the term "prosopography" and its interpretations and historical scholarship you need to pay attention to the philological aspect that directly affects the content of prosopographic research and perpetuate the difference in the composition of stages implemented within their framework.

Thus, in particular, in the German language the term "Prosopography", "Prosopographia" refers to the list of persons with biographical data, as well as the process of gathering information about these individuals, and the analysis of the data collected is determined by the term "Personenforschung" ("the study of personality"). This explains the lack of application of analytical procedures in many prosopographic studies carried out in Germany, and now around the world.

In English, French and Russian language the term "prosopography" refers to the collection of personal data and the creation on their basis of individual biography, and then common for the studied group of individuals of Metastasio, and its use for analytical (primarily quantitative) procedures with the aim of creating a "collective биографии2 group of persons investigated and its detailed study.

Stages of development of the analytical historical prosopographie

General provisions

The periodization of the development of the analytical method of prosopography can be built on the basis of a wide set of different criteria used in those disciplines in which prosopography is most popular: sociology, political science, history, etc. However, within the framework of this work, it seems appropriate to highlight the periods of prosopography development based on consideration of a combination of criteria used in historical science or in studies with historical the component. Such criteria include:

- the content of research tasks: from the study of elites to the study of "mass" social / professional, etc. groups; from the most accurate reconstruction of the biography of one historical person / group of persons; identification of common features in the biographies of a certain social / professional, etc. stratum to the formation of a collective portrait / collective biography with an analysis of its dynamic characteristics;

- the use of various sets of sources involved in research in different periods of prosopography development: single/mass; structured/unstructured; of the same type/variety, containing information of an exclusively biographical nature, or indirectly related to a particular person, etc.;

- application of traditional methods and techniques of source criticism: formation of a general set of sources related to one person /group of persons, assessment of its completeness and representativeness, clarification of the circumstances (history) of their (sources) creation and information interconnection/mutual influence; verification of their information; selection of the most reliable data and formation on their basis summary meta-source for each studied person/group of persons (contextual model of prosopographic databases); or the use of all available information from all available sources without assessing their reliability (factoid model of prosopographic databases, which is the basis of factoid prosopography);

- the use of interdisciplinary methods, including methods of sociology and computer science (database technologies, statistical packages, network analysis, web technologies, data science methods (in terms of data preparation; including artificial intelligence and machine learning, etc.);

- interpretation of the data obtained in the historical context, within the framework of a specific historical epoch/event; assessment of the impact of the research results on the processes of historical development;

- forms of publication of the results and conclusions of the study: from printing publications to Internet resources equipped with analytical tools for independent research, which can be carried out by a wide Internet audience.

The listed criteria in one or another composition determined the allocation of the proposed periods of development of analytical prosopography in world science. At the same time, it should be emphasized that the periodization of prosopography abroad and in the domestic tradition will be significantly different. This is due to certain specifics of the development of socio-humanitarian disciplines in the Soviet Union (political science, sociology, history), expressed in ideological control in general, and in criticism of the theories of political and managerial elites (V. Pareto, G. Mosca, R. Michels, C. Mills, etc.) in particular; in some delay in the mass use of computer technology in the humanities; as well as (especially in the last 30 years) in the imperfection of the forms of organization of research activities (too short time for the implementation of grants, poor funding, lack of practice in the formation of mixed research groups), etc.

Within the framework of this work, the author will not consider the periodization of prosopography separately for foreign and domestic science, but in the process of describing each of the allocated periods, he will note the characteristic features of the development of this scientific direction abroad and in domestic (Soviet/Russian) historiography.

Another advance notice concerns the issue of determining the exact dates of the beginning and end of each of the periods. It should be emphasized here that the designated boundaries of the periods, since the last third of the XX century, almost coinciding with decades, are rather conditional and can be shifted somewhat (by about 2-3 years) inside or outside the period under consideration, depending on the appeal to one or another analyzed criterion. In addition, all types of prosopographic studies that appeared and were formed at different stages of the development of this direction continue to coexist at the present time, being localized in separate socio-humanitarian disciplines and studies. 

Stage I

Prosopographic (analytical, quantitative) method of historical research was developed at the end of the XIX century. as an original approach to solving problems of political and social history.

The beginning of analytical prosopography is traditionally associated with two innovative studies-publications carried out by historians of Germany.

The first work of the German historian Theodor Mommsen – "Prosopographia Imperii Romani" (PIR, PIR1), published in three volumes 1897-1898 he was a kind of Handbook on the topic "who's who in the Roman Empire", which was presented to the biographies of patricians from the reign of Augustus to the end of the III century ad, who held the highest offices in the state ^[21]. Each published biography was a composite "metastatic" — a clear text, written on the basis of the collection, verification, analysis, and synthesis of all identified historical sources, directly or indirectly tells about the described person. The biography was written according to a certain scheme (uniform), and contain data on dates of birth and death, kinship officials (parents, wives, children), their political career. Mommsen suggested the hypothesis that because of the analytical research collective biography of the Imperial elite – with emphasis on the study of the political career of the nobility – you have to understand the motives behind the decisions of the Imperial administration, as (as he rightly suggested) activities of political institutions can be studied through analysis of social and professional activities of their employees.

The working hypothesis and the proposed approach to the solution of research tasks is considered the starting point for the development of analytical prosopographie as a method of research aristocratic, managerial elites and power structures of the state.

Subsequently, the work of Mommsen has undergone several modifications. In 1933 he published the first volume of the second, considerably expanded edition of the Handbook (PIR2), the last volume of which was published in November 2015 (URL: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography_of_the_Later_Roman_Empire). In the 1960s and 1970s RIP got its logical and chronological continuation of the research Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, conducted by experts at the University of Cambridge and published in three volumes 1971-1974

The second study-guide – Paulys Real-Encyclop?die der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Real encyclopedia of the Sciences of classical antiquity; Pauly-Wissowa / RE) – has more than 100 volumes and several reprints. The first edition, launched in 1837 historian August Fritz Pauli, was completed in 1852, it was followed by several reprints, most important of which is initiated by Georg Wissowa and Thomas M?ntzer who published over eighty-four years from 1894 to 1978 67-volume edition, to writing articles which attracted a total of more than 1,100 recognized historians, antiquarians and philologists of the classics.

A feature of this Handbook was a significant expansion of the persons, whose biography was included in the publication. In the process of gathering information about senators and the horsemen of the Roman Republic, the authors of the Handbook unexpectedly revealed an aristocratic group of individuals (nobilitas), which was the basis of power, exerting a great influence on the policy of Rome, but did not hold any official positions in public institutions. This discovery, recorded, published in 1920, the work of T. Munzer "Roman aristocratic parties and of a noble family" (R?mische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien), allowed us to conclude that the analysis of the activities of the institutions and officials insufficient for understanding the political and institutional history of the state and that prosopographia offers a promising alternative approach based on the expansion of the circle of the studied individuals, on the one hand, and the analysis of informal information relating to the personal lives of each band member (kinship and friendship relationships, marriages, property issues, etc.).

Confirmation of this hypothesis by means of quantitative analysis were: in 1912, Matthias gelzer published a study ^[22], which, using quantitative prosopographic analysis proved that the highest political office in the Roman Empire actually was monopolized by a small closed group of families, whose influence and power were based on informal patronage, friendship, and family alliances.

The value of the two dictionaries and the works of Seltzer in the history of analytical prosopographie is determined by three items:

first – the development of a unified method (questionnaire) description of the biography of each of the test persons on the basis of the identification, collection and verification of information of the wide range of sources and generation of a summary biography of metahistorical specific person;

the second is the understanding of necessity of application of a balanced analysis of the qualitative and quantitative characteristicsinherent in the characters constituting the study group, and as a result, awareness of the prospects for the use of mathematical procedures with the goal of creating a "collective biography";

third – understanding the features of prosopography as a method that is able to identify latently present the relationship between different aspects of biographies specific characters (and/or groups of characters) and give the possibility of determining the degree of influence of these relationships on socio-political realities.

II stage

The development of analytical prosopographie in the first decades of the XX century was marked by involvement in projects of young researchers, extension chronology (history of the middle ages and modern times) and geography studies (America, UK, France, Germany and other countries) when you save the interest primarily to political history, participation in small groups aristocracy or managerial elites.

Innovations of this period are associated with the names of the American economist and historian Charles O. Byrd, who in 1913 published a study on the founding fathers of the American Constitution ^[23], the German historian-antiquarian Helmut Berwe, who defended his doctoral dissertation in 1926 on the topic "Prosopography of the Empire of Alexander" ^[24], in which for the first time in German historiography combined the collection and analysis of data, and the English historian Lewis Namier, who presented in 1929 about the work on British parliamentarians at the beginning of the reign of George III ^[25].

It is necessary to say in detail about the work of Lewis Nemier, since in the historiography of Great Britain, dedicated to the XVIII century, and foreign historiography prosopography of the first half of the XX century. Namier is considered a "revolutionary" who has proven the existence of much deeper, complex and non-public mechanisms (personal, family, clan or regional interests) that lead people into politics than was previously believed. After analyzing the collective portraits of the Tories and Whigs, Namier came to the conclusion that these two parliamentary parties were not closely organized groups, but were assemblies of constantly changing and fluid small groups whose positions changed from question to question.

Namier's achievements in the field of prosopography are not limited only to this "meaningful" revolution. For the first time in world historiography, it was he who decided to maximize the range of sources involved in order to extract data from them for the biographies of persons belonging to the study group. In particular, Namier studied wills, tax reports and documents of personal origin of deputies of the House of Commons, which allowed him to obtain the most complete, reliable and representative information about the lives of these people. At the same time, for all his "historiographical and source–based revolutionism", Namier believed that the methods of prosopography (primarily structural analysis, which received a designation in his honor in the historiography of prosopography - "Namierism") are sensitive only for the study of small (professional, estate, etc.) groups (elites), and cannot also successfully They can be used to analyze large social or professional groups, especially if the biography of each person included in this set is poorly provided with sources.

Nevertheless, according to the assessment of the American historian and sociologist L. Stone, the studies of Mommsen, Gelzer, R. Saim ^[27], Namier, Berwe et al. laid the foundation and gave development to the so–called "school of elites" in prosopography, the subject of research in which are small groups of individuals – elites - exercising power, political, social, cultural, professional, etc. functions within a specific state in a specific chronological period. This direction is characterized by close attention to the nuances of the biographies of the studied persons, the creation and filling out of a detailed "questionnaire" for each of them ("personal meta-source") based on the involvement of a large number of mainly narrative sources and the preservation of unique information, a comparative-descriptive (mainly) method of analysis and interpretation of the results obtained ^{[16, p. 47, 69; 26, pp. 10-11]}. The studied historical periods within the prosopographical school of elites, as a rule, are antiquity and the Middle Ages; rare exceptions relate to the study of social groups of modern times.

Stage III

The next step in the development of the methodology of prosopography was the work of the American sociologist R. Merton, whose pen belongs to research in the field of history and sociology of science ^[28]. Unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, Merton used the prosopographic method to analyze not political history, but the history of science, in particular, to study the problem of the emergence and spread in England of the XVII century. interest in the natural sciences, and more broadly, about the social causes and mechanisms that determine the predominant development of a particular sphere of human activity, including culture and science in a certain historical period.

Merton's methodological innovations in the framework of prosopography as a research method were the refusal to study a group of people whose membership was known in advance (the methodology for conducting such a study was described in detail by A. Shastagnol ^[29]), and historians identified and used the widest possible range of sources to form detailed biographies of these persons. Merton used the British National Biographical Dictionary as a source base for his research, from which he selected articles about scientists based on an assessment of their scientific viability and contribution to natural sciences. Simply put, sociologist Merton was initially not interested in the details of the biographies of specific people, he set a different task: to find out how a certain type of consciousness of "average, impersonal" Englishmen was formed in the XVII century, which influenced their interest in natural sciences. Merton's second innovation was to use such facts of the biographies of the heroes of his research, which were described in the form of homogeneous variables (including those presented in encoded form) suitable for measuring statistical correlations.

Merton's conclusions ("Merton's thesis") were quite unexpected for the historiography of that time, because they proved a close relationship (correlation) between the development of the ideology of Puritanism with its sermons of diligence, thrift, a positive assessment of worldly activities, empiricism, utilitarianism, doubt of authority, attitude to knowledge as a God-pleasing occupation leading to the comprehension of wisdom The Creator and the development of experimental science, which greatly stimulated the general interest in natural science knowledge in general.

R. Merton's article "Science, Technology and Society in England of the XVII century", published in 1938, has been repeatedly republished ^[30] and is still controversial, however, one thing is certain – this work became the first text on the quantitative history and sociology of science ^[31].

Leonard stone noted that the study of Merton opened in prosopographie new direction – "mass school", which has a "quantitative" (in contrast to the "elite schools") character and largely owes its existence to sociology. This area is characterized by attention to the study of a much larger wider society ("anonymous" groups) is new; formulation of research tasks (study of the characteristic traits that are considered "typical" for the group), which are not influenced by the absence of detailed biographical information for some individuals in the sample as it is (lack of information) kompensiruet mass of data about the studied group; using the statistical sources of origin (or the conversion of information narrative sources encoded in digital form) and quantitative methods of study data. The resulting analysis the results are expressed usually in the form of numbers that reflect a certain social dynamics of the studied groups (e.g., social mobility or changes in the social position, etc.), and require a degree of skill in their interpretation in the context of historical development.

IV stage

After the Second world war, prosopographia as a method of research began to penetrate into the science of history and other European countries, including France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland, etc., but, as noted in his article N Burst ^[32] "the only publication in 1970-1971 important articles Nikola, Castagnola and stone were real growth prosopographic research."

In the 1970s, in foreign historiography were numerous discussions about the applicability of prosopographic methods and approaches to historical research, especially in social history, where legitimate interest in the study of not only the aristocracy, elite, professional groups, etc., but also ordinary members of the society – "Marines history," in the apt words of the French historian Irene Mara.

By the end of the 1970s it became obvious that specialists in the field of prosopographie need their own professional journals, and 1980 the year he began the publication of the magazine "Medieval Prosopography" (University of Michigan, USA https://wmich.edu/medievalpublications/journals/prosopography. The journal has been published so far, with 2021 called "Medieval People: Social Bonds, Kinship and Network", which reflected a significant evolutionary change in the methods and technology research. In January 2022, will see the light 36 issue). At the same time and in other scientific publications, historical profile began to publish numerous articles in which he discussed the applicability of prosopographie to study the various classes of medieval society, and society of the New time, methodological issues, etc.

A special role in the development of prosopography in the 1970s played the methods of work with mass sources, the development of which in the history of science has begun a decade earlier, and made it possible to introduce into scientific circulation large complexes of information, use of database technology and apply statistical methods of analysis.

A significant contribution to the attraction and development of methods of mass (structured) sources and application of quantitative methods and databases in historical research played the Soviet school of study under the guidance of academician ID Koval'chenko. Within this research tradition in the domestic historiography was introduced to the idea of prosopographie.

In this period, the most relevant were the problems of methodology prosopographic studies, notably questions:

- identify systems of mass sources to conduct such research; determination of the completeness, accuracy, representativeness;

- principles and methods of formation samples of historical sources and evidence of the ability of the study, obtaining important results and extrapolating the results to the whole population of sources, interpretation of the results ^{[33, 34, 35, 36]};

- the development of questionnaires for the studied objects (problem-oriented approach);

- the choice of mathematical methods of analysis, etc.

One of the first studies related to prosopographie and executed in the Soviet Union, are of the problematic group on the history of the working class, led by V. Z. Drobizhev. From 1970 to 1980, this research team has published 19 papers (including 11 articles and 3 monographs), directly or indirectly related to the analysis of the questionnaires of the delegates of the Congress of Soviets and professional censuses and the formation of collective portraits (faces) study of social groups ^[37].

The main differences of this period in the development of national historiography prosopographie was pattraction of a mass of historical sources a structured look; identifying opportunities to generate sampling populations; development of methods of mass sources (including conversion of qualitative indicators to quantitative for subsequent processing), the use of different statistical methods (descriptive, correlation, etc.) of analysis using the "big" computer.

The next decade in the national historiography has seen a sharp quantitative leap publications — 83 works (16 of them co-authored), the main distinctive features of which were: the extension of the range of studied social groups, as well as the chronological framework of the research, the widespread use of the relational model of databases and their efforts to create on its basis thematically interrelated ("complex") database ^{[38, 39]}, the problem of expanding the range of sources used (including narrative), the methods of transfer of information from unstructured sources into the forms, databases and the creation of MetaStock, the ways (of MetaStock) verification, validation and representativeness of information drawn from different sources (including cross-validation and selection criteria information in case of discrepancies in the sources) ^[40].

Analyzing the work of Soviet historians, made in 1970-1980s, it should be noted that in Russian historiography the term "prosopography" was conceived of the study, the result of which was static "form", "image", "portrait" of a social group, not evolving in time "collective biography". The most important reason for this was the use of systems of mass of historical sources (censuses, questionnaires, etc.) are often not repeated in time the composition of groups of people (for example, delegates of the party congresses), in addition, as a rule, committed the state of the people who were part of a study group, on a specific point in time ^[41].

Abroad a surge in popularity of prosopographie refers to the late 1970's—1980's, and is associated with the development of computer science in General ^{[42, 43]}, and the increasing penetration of the technology databases in historical research, in particular.

The possibilities and limitations of prosopographic methods discussed in the 1980s on a series of four conferences devoted exclusively to prosopographie. The first addressed methodological issues of studying medieval history and was conducted in December 1982, Its purpose was to discuss the problems of the applicability of prosopographic approaches to the study of the various groups and sectors of society from the bishops to the peasants, from students to residents. In October 1984 took place in Paris just two of the conference. The first, organized by fran?oise Autrans ^[44] (Prosopographie et genese de l’?tat moderne), was devoted to the study of officials of the European States of the early modern period (XIII—XVII centuries); the second, organized by h?l?ne millet (Informatique et prosopographie) ^[45], have focused on the use of computer technology in prosopographic studies. The last of the four conferences "Prosopographia: problems and methods" was held in Rome in Ecole Francaise in December 1985 and covered a wide range of research: from the Romans to the refugees from Nazi France (La prosopographie. Problemes et methodes) ^[46]. In the course of these conferences was presented and discussed for more than a hundred reports related to the large variety of prosopographic interests covering a wide range of issues and complexes of historical sources has been implicated as a source base for research; and the 1985 conference on the use of computer technology in prosopographic research has confirmed that "prosopographic information is ideal for the application of computer analysis" ^[47].

The rapid development of foreign prosopographie also benefited from the active work of the first national Association "History and Computing" (UK, 1984), and then the eponymous international Association (AHC, 1986). Appreciating almost 20 years of methodological and technological innovations of the 1980s, K. Keats-Rohan wrote: "For those of us who write and publish prosopographic books that need re-release before the printing ink has dried, the emergence of databases with the possibilities endless replenishment of new information has become an absolute fortune" ^{[2, p. 4]}. Really high-quality designing and creating databases, you can continue to work on the basis of a constant point update, expand and Refine the data, without resorting to complex processing of the collected information that was characteristic of the pre-computer prosopographie when it existed in the form of aggregated articles on each of the studied characters and the "manual" dimension.

However, by the end of the 1980s it became clear that the use of quantitative methods in prosopographic research and the creation of large databases have their limitations. In particular, the table, the maximum structured and formalized models of databases did not allow you to work successfully with information unstructured form, forcing the researcher to "sacrifice" a unique information source that do not fit in a pre-planned graphs-criteria, to structure the information source, "pushing her in a straitjacket" (in the words of Professor of the University of Illinois Ralph Mathisen, government in the mid-2000s, experience with databases prosopographie ^[47]). The solution to this problem was seen in the development of specialized software (the database management system, DBMS), which would allow to take into account in the generated database any information source. One of the proposed solutions has become a DBMS (KLEIO) designed for source-based and freely-programmable descriptions of the studied objects (including facts from the biographies of the individuals included in the study group) ^{[48, 49]}. The development of a hierarchical database was launched in 1978, and the first presentation in the framework of the project "workstation historian" was held in 1986 ^[50]. KLEIO based on the original data model is closely related to the notion of a semantic network. He M. taller described the ideology developed by the DBMS: "IN KLEIO working with historical source is carried out by possibly literal rewriting of various fragments of it, mapped to the individual elements of the database. All knowledge of the meaning of the copied fragments are stored separately in the layer system, which is specially devoted to knowledge management. Any user request, any team access to the recorded data source is interpreted in accordance with the knowledge about the source, stored in the car. Visual reproduction transcribed source is stored in the database; fragments of it can be played on a suitable output device. After the reproduction of the source selected and issued on the screen, it can be modified subsystems, including the full range of image processing".

However, apart from these methodological innovations, the development of prosopography in the 1980s, it has been noted that innovations in issues of chronology and geography studies that have become more diverse ^{[51, 52, 53]}. In addition to studying the political, aristocratic, national, religious, scientific, military, and professional elites and create collective portraits static/images/skins anonymous groups, the questions were formulated about the use in the framework of prosopographic research established in other disciplines (e.g., historical demography) database ^[54], there prosopographic works are characterized by the "macro" (several centuries and in different social strata in the management of one state ^[55]), or, on the contrary, held at the "micro level", for example, at the level of the population of the small village ^[56]. This experience-innovation has been adopted by many researchers, and its use became possible in the framework of scientific research programmes, the implementation of which also became an innovation in the 1980s, For example, prosopographic research was given a Central place in the research project "the Genesis and current state of the state" carried out since 1984, the National center for scientific research of France, and the project Manager J.–F. Wife prosopographia described as "an important method for those who wants to study the Genesis of the modern state" and "the incomparable research tool" for the study of elites and their relationship with the state ^[57].

In this study, in France, it was attempted to develop specialized prosopographic PROSOP system, designed to work on the subject of medieval prosopography. The system was supposed to solve three interrelated objectives:

implementation matrix (matrix) with a numeric coding, allowing you to use the latest (at the time) statistical software (OSIRIS, SPSS, SAS), to be able to perform various types of sorting and other methods of statistical analysis ^[93];

- the creation of a directly editable biographical dictionary readers to statistical studies could rely on readily available to search for free records;

implementation of opportunities of use of the database, including a complete indexing and search mechanisms for particular areas using the procedures of choice, sorting and editing.

The system was fully implemented and later it was repeatedly modified, primarily in the transition from the encoded information to chelovechestva the presentation of information and with the advent of the Internet, was developed using MySQL and XML languages (W3C standards) ^[58].

V phase

The next period of development of prosopographie (late 1980s-1990s) caused by the microcomputer revolution, which, on the one hand, have provided historians independence from the presence or absence of computer capacities in large data centers, and on the other – made in the agenda of the problems of working with databases, technical issues which significantly simplified and accelerated, which could not be said about the methodology of processing and reflection of the information sources. This issue has become a key and Russian and foreign prosopographie ^{[59, 60, 61, 62]}.

In the 1990s abroad was offered few solutions. The first – mentioned and approved including prosopographic works of researchers of the CIS DBMS KLEIO ^{[63, 64, 65]}.

The second is not less known in Western Europe, the development of the Dutch historian L. Brera (University of Utrecht) is a specialized add-on DBMS SOCRSTES allowed with the library TGF-programs (more than 100 additional procedures and functions) to integrate DBMS relational model (dBASE IV and higher) machine-readable documents with unstructured text and process it ^{[66, 67]}.

The third decision was based on the rapidly evolving technology of optical character recognition (OCR), allowing you to quickly and fairly accurately create machine-readable files of scanned printed (published) texts and to include these texts in full in the database. One of the first such work was the project "Continental origins of English landlords" (The Continental Origins of English Landowners — COEL — URL: http://coelweb.co.uk/coeldatabase.html) ^[68], whose goal was the establishment of a prosopographic registry of all persons referred to in English documents (primarily in the Domesday Book) for a century after the Norman conquest (1066-1166 gg.). In the database were included Latin texts of more than 4 thousand documents in the database are associated with analytical materials about 9 thousand people and their families.

Finally, I must mention two areas of work related to database technology and implemented in the 1990s: mechanical transfer a previously created prosopographic directories (prosopographic of publications) in the shell of databases and their presentation to the public.

Evaluating after 10 years, the results of the development of new directions in prosopographic studies, John. Bradley and H. Short, the experts at king's College in London, wrote: "Structured materials in a database "Prosopographia the Byzantine Empire" (PBE—I) was converted to be published on CD-ROM in a set of independent pointers that gave the user a number of different ways to access the records included persons including: search by names, job position, for the religion they professed an ethnic community to which they belonged, geographically, with whom they were associated, and a number of other criteria. In addition, CD has allowed to combine criteria to find people who meet certain characteristics. It is the addition of structured information and providing various ways to access it made PBE on CD so popular among the user community" ^[69]. The authors of this work has shown one of the important ways in which "the result has varied historical science", enabling secondary use of data and involvement in the ranks of the explorers of new faces, who were preparing an "independent peer reviews" based on the materials contained on the CD.

In Russian historiography prosopographia the 1990s, marked by several events on both the methodological and organizational measures.

Firstly, by the beginning of the 1990s, the final formation of the concept of prosopography as a direction studying the biographies of people in dynamics, i.e. analyzing the characteristics reflecting the change of objects of study over time ^[70] and applying the appropriate mathematical tools. At the same time, as noted by I.M. Garkova, quoting J. Verger, a significant step was made "from statistics to prosopography", which implied such a method of studying prosopographic information, which was based on searching and bringing together data from various, including mass, sources and the formation of a consolidated meta-source. In this manifested feature of prosopographic research, the information retrieval aspect of research has found expression in contrast to the simple statistical processing of mass information ^[71].  

At the same time, new methodological philosophical approaches to the study of "life paths" were proposed ^{[60, 62]}, which made it possible to slightly change the interpretation of the term "mass sources" in relation to prosopographic studies and include in it all historical sources (regardless of the type) containing information about persons belonging to the group under study.

Secondly, the creation of a Consortium for Databases in Historical Research at the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The consortium was created on the initiative of specialists from the Institute of the History of the USSR of the USSR Academy of Sciences, MSU and MGIAI. The idea of forming a Consortium was also supported by the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the USSR State University, VNIIDAD, a number of other scientific institutions and university historical departments, as well as a number of foreign scientists. The Consortium was headed by Academician I.D. Kovalchenko ^{[72, 73]}. In 1992 The consortium was transformed into a Data Bank on Russian History (BDRI) ^[74]. It is noteworthy that one of the first databases registered in the BDRI were prosopographic databases and studies, the descriptions of which were carried out according to the scheme (metadata) developed by the leadership of the BDRI ^{[75, 76]}. In the future, this catalog was used for registration in the period 1994-2000 of several dozen research databases in the STC "Informregister" (http://www.inforeg.ru ) and their inclusion in the indexes of "Databases in Russia" (Moscow, 1992-1998).

Thirdly, the creation of the Russian Association "History and Computer" (1992), within the framework of which domestic prosopographic research was mainly developed.

Fourth, a special role in the formation of interest in prosopographic research in Russia was played by the textbook by I.M. Garskova "Databases and data banks in historical research", published in 1994. in the series "Ten new textbooks on Historical Disciplines" (Moscow-G?tingen), in which the basics of database theory were presented on the example of domestic prosopographic studies ^[77].

Fifth, a discussion about source- and problem-oriented databases, which was a reflection of the general problems of historical informatics in the mid-1990s in terms of working with information from historical sources ^[78].

Sixth, an attempt to develop a domestic prosopographic research toolkit — a specialized information system called PROSIS, introduced in the mid-1990s at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and RSUH ^[79]. The system used an original "cognitive-oriented approach" to the development of historical information systems, which took into account not only the data of historical sources, but also the "cognitive and psychological characteristics of the historian as a user", as a result of which a specific "hypertext system" was created, which used, among other things, elements of network analysis and graph theory ^[80].

Seventh, the 1990s. the method of prosopographic research has "crossed the boundaries" and has become in demand among researchers from CIS countries. The chronological framework of research has also expanded significantly ^{[81, 82, 83]}.

The interim results of the development of prosopography abroad and in Russia were almost synchronously summed up in the early 2000s. In the UK, the Center for Prosopography of Modern Historical Studies at Oxford University published an Index "Selected Bibliography of works related to prosopography" ^[84], which listed the most significant studies carried out in foreign countries during the XX century. and related to various chronological periods. A little later, the same Center presented the "Handbook of Prosopographic Studies" on its website (https://prosopography.history.ox.ac.uk/directory.htm ), in which modern projects were mentioned, information about which was available to the specialists of the Center. The results of some studies were then published in the information journal "Prosopon" (Archive 1994-2006 ^[85]).

In Russia, for the 10th anniversary of the Association "History and Computer", in 2002, a database of prosopographic studies was created, which was supplemented by newly identified publications (by 2005 in total, 156 prosopographic databases and 367 publications about them were identified), analyzed and presented in the form of a generalizing article ^[86]. It drew conclusions on the history of the development of historical and biographical research in the USSR and Russia for the period 1970-2000, performed using the prosopography method.

Thus, at the turn of the XX—XXI centuries. in foreign and domestic historiography, prosopography has been recognized as an urgent interdisciplinary field of research, the leading role in the formation of which was played by historical science.

Stage VI

The beginning of the third Millennium was marked by the rapid development of Internet technologies and the spread of interest in methods of social network analysis, which has brought its own peculiarities in the development of prosopography, in particular, researchers have aimed not just on the formation of databases and their analysis, and the creation of the information resources hosted on the Internet. It should be emphasized that prosopographia, which is already in the 1990s, has served as a catalyst for the application of new information technologies in historical research, increasingly expanding the range of techniques that "work" to improve the research method, was one of the first areas in historical research, mastered the Internet environment. The preparation for this "jump" was conducted in the foreign historiography of prosopographie gradually since the mid-1990s, it is no Coincidence that context-related prosopographic studies is a series of editions, published by order of the Service of historical data in the research data Archive UK (History Data Service, UK Data Archive http://hds.essex.ac.uk/; https://www.data-archive.ac.uk/) in the framework of the project "digital history", in particular, study guide 1999 "Guide to creating digital resources on the basis of historical documents" ^[87].

Focus on creating a holistic information resources hosted on the Internet, and the need to solve the problem of conservation in the databases of the different interpretations of historical sources and their influence on the generated collective biography became the main trends in the development of the methodology of historical prosopographic studies of the first two decades of the XXI century both abroad and in Russia.

At the same time, as rightly pointed out by the canadian researcher Didier, the development of prosopographie beginning of the third Millennium was intimately connected with the activities of the international Association of History&Computing and its branches — national associations across Europe and America, conducted numerous conferences, symposia and workshops, where "regularly organized discussion, criticism and presented improvements prosopographic method, which was replenished with a large number of studies [studies] in time or space ^[88]".

International scientific cooperation and critical analysis of the positive and negative aspects of previous technological solutions (e.g., DBMS KLEIO) is allowed to take the next step in the modernization of prosopographic tools. First problem solving modification of the content of the familiar structures prosopographic database specialists from the Royal College in London. They proposed the so-called "factory" approach to database design, which included the formation of the records of specific target face in the form of "factoid-approval" derived from historical source: "source "S" in the location "L (Chapter, section, page, paragraph)" according to something ("F") about a person "P"" ^{[69, p. 8]}.

The term "factoid" was first used by D. Smythe and Mr. Gallagher in the mid-1990s in the recycling process ("rethinking oriented data") project "Prosopographia the Byzantine Empire" (PBE-I — http://www.pbe.kcl.ac.uk/) ^{[89, 90]}. The term implies not just an established researcher on the basis of a thorough analysis of sources of comparing them and finding out reliable information "scientific" fact about the person, and the verbatim the allegations of the source (text) on the target character, regardless of the completeness, granularity and accuracy of this information. All identified factoids (and undoubtedly accurate, and reliable, and conflicting) needs to be present in the database. This inclusion in the database of potentially unreliable information lies smack ironic use of the term "factoid", which in linguistics is denoted unverified or false statement, a simulation of fact.

In the implementation of factoids prosopographie made possible the simultaneous use of large blocks of machine-readable text (later with the development of technology of scanning electronic copies of primary sources), markup languages XML and relational database models (originally implemented in DBMS Tamino, eXist, Xindice XML compatible). Thus, factory approach has allowed, on the one hand, to create a full sense of the word source-oriented database that contains machine-readable texts and structured information, is intended for search of functions and statistical analysis ^{[69, 91]}, and on the other – the full information resources, focused on performance in the Internet environment and not just the access of users to the databases, and the ability to conduct independent research.

Based on this approach, the experts at king's College in London in the period from the late 1990s to early 2010s were implemented and presented on the Internet several major prosopographic projects presented on single portal "Fasteigna prosopographia" (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/factoid-prosopography/about).

These created over the last 20 years of the database and methods of analysis continue to develop. Thus, in particular, for the database PASE (the"Prosopographia Anglo-Saxon England" – URL: https://pase.ac.uk/) was created, faceted search system (search by multiple criteria/filters simultaneously), who worked in the network directly on the relational database; a database for the "People of medieval Scotland" (PoMS – URL: https://www.poms.ac.uk/) developed by the research services using network models of social network analysis (SNA); based on this database also created the first English prosopographie outdoor dataset the possibility of combining factoing approach and Conceptual CIDOC reference model (CRM) (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/), which is a common and extensible semantic framework for information integration in the field of cultural heritage, etc.

The rapid development of the Internet and the publication of the network of a large number of historical sources presented in machine-readable or electronic copies, had also influenced the development of prosopographie. So, in the database "the Creation of a Europe of Charlemagne" (URL: http://www.charlemagneseurope.ac.uk/) as the source base was used sources, published online, so the developers of the database can store the hyperlinks to presented online document as a whole, which was not very convenient from the point of view of the formation of factoids for each of the studied character. The solution to this problem was seen in the application of the methods of markup machine-readable text. One approach markup TEI – was, however, turned down by experts, and alternatively proposed the use of the results of the project ChartEx (www.chartex.org; https://www.brighton.ac.uk/csius/what-we-do/research-projects/chartex.aspx), which was carried out in the framework of the international research program (grant competition) "Digging into Data Challenge" ("deep into the problem of data" – https://www.diggingintodata.org).

The ChartEx project was aimed at development of tools for the study, initially, a medieval European charters and provided for the creation of the tools of machine-readable texts for the solution of three problems:

– natural language processing (NLP): for the analysis and annotation of individual records in English and Latin;

– data Mining for the discovery of new relations between objects, entities, events, given the analysis is not one of the studied individuals, but groups of persons;

– create interactive virtual "desktop" complex tools that would allow historians to explore the extracted information, especially relationships between entities to reason about these entities and add additional information and comments.

Essentially, the ChartEx tools give the possibility of forming vysokoerudirovannye data characteristic of databases or semantic network ^[92]. Launched in 2011, several project teams with varying degrees of success for each of the three areas is still ongoing, and it is associated with hope in English prosopographic school ^[93].

Another trend of the 2000s in the Western historiography of prosopographie was the emergence of textbooks on methodology prosopographic studies. The first such textbook – "Prosopography Approaches and Applications A Handbook" ^[94] – was created in 2007 by specialists of the research Department of modern history at Oxford University under the leadership of K. Keats-Rohan. The text of this textbook consisted of separate articles-essays, written by historians-prosopographie working in different scientific and educational institutions of Europe. Three articles were published on the dedicated portal Prosopography (https://prosopography.history.ox.ac.uk/course_syllabuses.htm) as a "Guide on the basic principles and practices of proposerai" ("Guide to the principles and practice of prosopography") and, together with the designed examples exercises were one of the first combined teaching materials in the field of prosopographic research.

The second textbook was published in 2011 by French researchers and was called "the Commandments of prosopographie" (http://quanti.ihmc.ens.fr/Les-commandements-de-la.html). Its authors were well-known historians Claire Lumber and Emmanuel Picard ^[95]. Paying tribute to the textbook K. Keats-Rohan and based on our own experience, the authors of "commandments" elaborate on some positions, and made up for the gaps in the description of the technique of prosopographic research.

Russian prosopographia "zero" years of the third Millennium grow thematically, chronologically, quantitatively, qualitatively. Thus, according to the RISC and the project "Cyberleninka" in the period 2000-2010 was published over 300 articles directly or indirectly related to the prosopographic method used in historical research (within the framework of political, ecclesiastical, economic, and intellectual history; history of the Ancient world, Medieval, modern and contemporary art, in philosophy, sociology, political science, public administration, science and other scientific disciplines.

Came the publication of a methodological nature, in which prosopographia was regarded as one of the modern trends of interdisciplinary studies ^{[96, 97, 98]}, we have analyzed its tools, the sensitivity of the method to the study of different perspectives, both positive and negative aspects of prosopographie, the specific structure of the prosopographic database at the present stage ^[99], the use of different historical sources ^[100], etc. Simultaneously published articles on the history of the prosopographic method, including in the field of natural science (in particular, in the history of prosopography was "returned" to the name of the outstanding Russian Soviet genetics Y. A. Filipchenko ^[101]).

This period also marked a significant expansion of the number of researchers due to grant support (including foreign funds) and the implementation of such projects in the regional Universities. It gave a certain "regional" shade prosopographic works, the objects of study in which they became, on the one hand, the regional elites ^{[102, 103, 104, 105]}, on the other, the people in the territory during the implementation of any activity, or the fates (the last fully applies the prisoners of the Gulag system ^{[106, 107, 108]}.

A prominent role in the implementation of prosopographic research began to play the regional research group, closely associated with the Association "History and computer" and acting for the relevant faculties and departments of Tambov state University. G. R. Derzhavina, Perm state University, the Ural state University. A. M. Gorky and others, as well as in higher education institutions of the CIS countries (Belarus state University, Kazakh national University. al-Farabi) ^{[74, pp. 160-200]} and individual researchers, opening the possibility of new research methodology.

Culturology ^{[109, 110, 111]} and museology ^[112] became relatively new areas of research in which the prosopographic method began to be applied in the context of historical science.

The development of the methodology of prosopography in this period was marked by certain innovations, among which it is necessary to note:

- expansion of the chronological framework. For example, in the study of T.N. Kandaurova and Yu.Yu. Yumasheva (the database "Patrons" ^[113]), the task was set to identify common characteristics of individuals (in this case, collectors and patrons) who were engaged in the same field of activity and reached significant heights in it, but lived at different times (since the end of the XVII century . until the middle of the XX century.) and in the conditions of different social structures (the method of sociological longitudinal research applied to the solution of the historical problem). This study clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of the prosopographic method, which made it possible to identify and analyze the specific professional traits of a particular group of people whose activities were not rigidly determined by the political system or economic structure.;

- the extension of the prosopographic method to the study of the dynamic characteristics of inanimate objects. The mentioned study on patrons and collectors showed the possibility of studying the "biographies" of any objects with at least one time-varying characteristic by prosopography methods. In particular, such objects can be both museum collections as a whole (the history of formation, purchase / sale of items in the collection, etc.), and individual items of museum storage (transition from one owner to another, from one collection to another, changing the state of preservation, participation in exhibition projects, the history of restoration, etc.).

- development of methods of working with historical sources and verification of the source base. This problem, which has occupied domestic historians working in the field of historical informatics since the mid-1990s ^[78], was developed in the method proposed in the study of O.V. Skobelkin and Yu.Yu. Yumasheva ^{[114, 115]}. Just like the English specialists who developed the direction of factoid prosopography ^[69], but independently of them, an attempt was made in the work of Russian historians to change the traditional approach to building prosopographic databases and realize the possibility of preserving information from all identified sources in the study without its verification at the preliminary source stage, and the determination of reliability and selection specific values for the statistical processing of information and the construction of a collective biography, to produce at the stage of database analysis. To implement this idea in the project "Foreigners in the Russian service in the first third of the twentieth century." all documents identified in the RGADA were copied, and their electronic images were integrated into the database, which, on the one hand, allowed for real-time verification of the transfer of information from text sources written in cursive of the XVII century, into machine-readable the fields (attributes) of the database, and on the other hand, retained a close connection with the source, since each value of each attribute in the database had a link to the source. The selection of records necessary for the formation of a meta-source and the conduct of analytical procedures was carried out by setting a marker in the "Reliability" field entered for each analyzed attribute and selected value. Thus, all information about the subject area under study was stored in the database with strict localization and connection with a specific source, and the meta-source was formed by the query method. The proposed mechanism of operation allowed for transparent verification of the inclusion of information in the meta–source, and during statistical procedures and interpretation of the data obtained, it was possible to check for the "stability" of conclusions depending on the choice of certain attribute values included in the meta-source ^[116].

Another project that was distinguished by special attention to working with the content of historical sources was the information system "Russian Parliamentarians of the early twentieth century." (http://helios.psu.ru/pls/parlament / – as of 01.02.2022 unavailable), created by Perm specialists ^[117]. The work was distinguished by the presentation of full texts of historical sources, orientation to multitasking research. The system made it possible to obtain information about the composition of the deputy corps of the State Duma in 1906-1917, to make samples of deputies according to certain parameters and on this basis to carry out prosopographic studies. Technologically, this system was also innovative, because it was implemented on the basis of the Oracle Application Server software package, which ensured its cross-platform compatibility; when programming, its authors used PL/SQL language applications; and besides, the system functioned through a web interface and was available on the Internet ^[118].

- the emergence of hybrid prosopographic studies in which elements of microhistory and demography are clearly visible. Such studies include the database "Noble Family" created by a group of specialists of Tambov State University named after G.R. Derzhavin ^[119], based on the methodology of restoring the history of families (VIS), the use of historical and demographic sources (metric books, confessional murals and cases of noble families), as well as narrative (memoirs, correspondence, etc.) and dedicated to the history and members of only one noble family, the head of which was V.V. Davydov.

This study paved the way for a trend that was fully realized already in the 2010s and implies the widespread use in prosopographic research of new, previously unused information technologies and analysis methods (for example, mapping and geoinformation systems (GIS), facet analysis, etc.).

The popularity of prosopographic research in the national historiography in the 2000s, naturally led to the defense of the first thesis for the degree of doctor of historical Sciences, the topic of which was prosopographic study of the Novgorod society of the early XVII in ^{[120, 121]}. Scientific work carried out by A. A. Selin, except the impressive outcome of specific historical character, was marked by three unconditional historiographical innovations for the time. First, in the theoretical part of the work was made one of the first attempts in the national historiography to perform two directions in the development of prosopographie, namely, biographical prosopographia, which are a compilation of biographical dictionaries, handbooks, and analytical prosopographia, with a Central role being played by "the study of these groups/groups in a particular historical epoch" ^{[121, p. 8]}. Second, A. A. Selin one of the first in the national historiography prosopographie used the HTML markup language, and internal hyperlinks to the formation of a database and reflect information about the employment, office, business and family relationships of the studied entities. And finally, thirdly, the author has submitted made the database in open access on the Internet (http://nwae.spb.ru/documents/selin/gentry.rar. 01.02.2022 on the city database is unavailable), which is still extremely rare in domestic historiography.

Considering the history of development of Russian historical prosopographie in the late 1990s and first decade of the XXI century, we cannot ignore the conduct of prosopographic research by the staff of the archives and the creation and publication on the websites of state and departmental archives in the Internet thematic biographical databases, based on archival documents.

Research projects in the archives are quite rare in connection with the specifics of the organization of scientific activities archives. The first full-scale prosopographic study of the development of a database on the basis of information declassified personal Affairs, analysis procedures, and historical interpretation of the received results was carried out by staff Mosgorarkhiv in the mid-1990s, research on the topic of "disenfranchisement in Moscow in the 1920-1930-ies" on the basis of which was published monograph ^[122]. Following similar tasks and scale prosopographic study is implemented since the early 2010s in GA Rostov region. In this multi-year project conducted by the formation of a full-scale prosopographic database of don officers of the Patriotic war of 1812 and foreign campaigns of the Russian army in 1813-1814, the participants of the First world war, members of the military administration during the First world war. As one of the key elements of the source base of the research is the official personal archive directory ^{[123, 124]}.

Creating databases and electronic catalogs – the second activity of the archival institutions actively developing since the 2000s, These archival information resources (air) are for reference only and are not in the full sense of prosopographic, as their creation is not completed by the formation of a "collective biography" or "images", but they represent the first and most necessary step prosopographic research is the formation of a database of biographical information ^{[125, 126, 127, 128, 129]}.

In General, the period of development of the domestic prosopographie in the 2000s was very productive, but at the same time there are some problems that can be described as "growing pains". Among these problems include:

- confusion, when the authors of the research, applying a prosopographic method (a method of creating a collective biography), attributed their work to the biography of ^{[130, 131, 132, 133]}, – the direction of cultural studies, Central to which is the study of the life path of one person;

- a reduction in the number of completed studies historical and prosopographic studies: authors declared the beginning of the development of a particular topic, but after this announcement the study was not developed and was not brought to its logical conclusion in the form of a database or execution of the research results in the form of publication;

- continuation of the chargeability of the work, which was created static collective portraits/images/forms to prosopographie;

- the lack of research carried out by teams of researchers: a typical writing team consisted of a maximum of two or three researchers that made it impossible to introduce into scientific circulation volume collection of sources, or to make a large-scale thematic projects;

certain technological gap: unlike foreign researchers actively applied in prosopographic projects, new information technologies, the works of Russian authors are still based on rather simple DBMS (such as Access) and relatively simple statistics.

VII stage

Many of manifested in 2000 years of trends in foreign and domestic historiography of prosopographie continued in the 2010-ies, involving in scientific prosopographic the scope of historians from countries where previously this area were not developed (for example: Brazil, Hungary, India, Morocco, Portugal, Turkey, South Korea, etc.) and expanding the chronological framework of the research until the archaeological periods.

In this period did not end until the present time, quantitatively and very actively developing both directions of prosopographie:

first – the study of the various elites ^[134] (political, religious, military, scientific, economic, etc.), which usually begin their journey in prosopographie historians neophytes, or sociologists and political scientists actively using prosopographic method.

Analyzing the results presented in the framework of this direction, it should be noted emerged in the historiography of prosopographie interest in financial and business elites ^{[135, 136, 137]}, sport elite ^[138], to the study of professional elites in medicine and science ^[139] introduced racial and caste prosopographia ^{[140, 141]}, as well as the continued development of gender prosopographie ^{[142, 143]} T. p. it is Obvious that in many of these works are closely intertwined the methods of historical prosopographie and even sociology and demography, but this is the modern trend in the development of "elite schools";

second – the study of the extensive social and professional groups/strata of the population that is more inclined to the use of new technical means ^{[144, 145, 146]} and the formation of arrays of open data published to the Internet.

Noting the ongoing development of prosopographie in General, it should be noted that in this period of research methodology (philosophy of historical prosopographic studies) has not been grown with new approaches, the source base have not changed substantially compared to the previous stage (the only part of the amount transferred in a machine-readable sources), and innovations are associated primarily with the use of new information technologies, which primarily include the technology of optical character recognition (OCR), data science (data wrangling&analysis, including machine learning, artificial intelligence) and web technologies.

Abroad in the field of prosopographie actively continue to work English experts. In particular, John. Bradley and his colleagues at king's College London, having exhausted the research and publication of the features of traditional embodiments of prosopographic research, tried to find new ways of development of prosopographie. As was stated goal of exploring the possibility of presenting svobodnoradikal factoids prosopographic database "Digital prosopography of the Roman Republic" (DPRR) ^[147] in the form of linked open data (Linked Open Data LOD) and improving search engines. This formulation of the problem was the result of the analytical conclusions about the development of Internet, and the concept of the semantic web ^[148] contained in the publications of the Creator of the world wide web Sir Timothy John Berners Lee ^{[149, 150]}.

As a result English specialists work DPRR was the first humanitarian project in which a complete data set included in the prosopographic database was published on specially crafted RDF server (the Resource Description Framework model (Wednesday) to describe an information resource, metadata) data in LOD (https://romanrepublic.ac.uk/rdf) ^{[151, 152]}.

These innovations have allowed us to significantly extend the use of prosopographic database, including:

- did all the data from DPRR available worldwide thanks to a public URI (Uniform Resource Identifier – a uniform (uniform) resource ID – approx. of the author)), and the opportunities to associate these IDs all the information available in the database and the corresponding object;

- ensured the entry and search in the database, not only a "starting point" – the person, and any attributes (classes and specific values) and used sources, since every (sic!) record in the database has its own URI.

- presented data on the network in a highly structured form, which is suitable for further processing, not just the viewing screen;

- give the ability to link the existing Internet and related to the objects included in the database, information (collection) with the goal of "enriching resource" (based on the idea of "semantic binding" and analysis "annotation" – descriptions (metadata) resource);

- opened the prospect of a new analytical procedures and obtain a completely new knowledge.

Thus, the active use of new information technologies gave and gives the opportunity to make a significant step forward in the implementation of prosopographic projects, turning them from the chamber, executed by a team of researchers works in the huge data sets available on the Internet for any researcher.

The most famous prosopographic mega-project of the last decade in the world is the project "Chinese biographical database" (China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/home) implemented jointly by the Center for Chinese studies Ferbane at Harvard University (), Institute of history and Philology of the academia Sinica (), centre for the study of ancient Chinese history at Peking University (). The chronological framework of the project – from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries, a number of personalities involved in the study – 515 488 individuals (as of December 2021).

The work started over 10 years ago with a mass of manual translation of texts in machine-readable form, their recognition and manual marking, continued using the methods of artificial intelligence for search, detection, integration, and automatic marking of thematic texts published in print and on the Internet, and receive them on the basis of data (a list of sources https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/cbdb-sources). A feature of the database is that, first, it is replenished in real time, and secondly, it takes into account all published digitally historical sources that mention the investigated persons, and all the discrepancies that exist in the information about them.

The database allows analytical procedures typical of prosopographic research (for example, to find out kinship relationships officials (including online); the structure of the database – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/structure-cbdb), in order to determine the impact of specific factors on career growth), and perform GIS analysis using GIS packages (project of the China Historical GIS (CHGIS) – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/gis-mapping-and-analyzing; https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/), statistical analysis and social network analysis (https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/social-networks).

Implementation of the project followed by a regular press releases describing the performed innovations and available methods (techniques) analysis.

Close the idea of the project was carried out in Belgium in 2012-2016 called BiographyNet (http://www.biographynet.nl/). The creation of this project brought together experts, researchers, studying history, computer linguistics and computer science. The project uses data from the biography portal of the Netherlands (BPN – http://www.biografischportaal.nl/), which contains about 125 000 biographies of various Dutch biographical dictionaries from the eighteenth century and to the present, describing about 76,000 people. BiographyNet goal is to increase the information value generated prosopographic database and other biographical data sets for historical research through the use of RDF servers and improve the parameters of the search and presentation of its results using the tools of natural language processing (NLP – Natural Language Processing) ^[153], a query language SPARQL and Grounded Annotation Framework (https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=1641728737&tld=com&lang=en&la=1639828992&text=http%3A//groundedannotationframework.org/&url=http%3A//groundedannotationframework.org/&l10n=en&mime=html&sign=a870945c1f5181d35c245223cb0d2f12&keyno=0) is a tool that gives the ability to link to information about persons and events with the places of their mentioning in the test sources ^[154]. Presentation of the capabilities of the network presented in the short video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIjDMWADMeY), intended for the primary target group of the project – professional historians who study European history modern and contemporary. Created prosopographic network allows not only to create a collective biography, using statistical methods, but also to visualize the biography of individuals, groups of people, reflect their participation in certain events, a series of events, noting these facts on the timeline, to classify events according to their severity depending on the number of participants, but also provides a constant verification of the biographical information using historical sources ^[155].

Another similar research project dedicated to the medieval nobility is being implemented in Spain and is called HILAME (Hidalgos, Labradoras, Mercaderes – https://www.hilame.info/). The project "stands on the shoulders" of several implemented in the 1990s and the 2000s research and therefore an integrated approach, combining the possibility of creating a prosopographic database based on the context and factoids models, as well as providing a wide research tools, including verification of the source base, the creation of a "collective biography", mapping, social network analysis, and even the techniques and methods of genealogy and demography ^[156].

Studying the development of prosopography in the 2010s, it is not hard to see that web applications, semantic web, linked open data, visualization, networking, research, mapping biographical networks have become a Central trends of this period in the evolution of prosopographic research abroad.

However, under the influence of the popularity of Data Science in prosopographie there has been quite a specific roll, reflected in the fact that a prosopographic projects do not end with the analysis and synthesis of the obtained data, the interpretation of the received results and formation of a "collective biography" as well as its integration in a historical context, and stop at the stage of extraction of biographical historical sources (data wrangling, with the use of machine learning algorithms and computer-aided design database structures ^{[157, 158, 159]}), linking data and the creation of large data sets (often in the form of open data). This trend is particularly clearly visible in the projects implemented in the field of Digital Humanities, in which the leading role played by philologists and linguists are actively used in the development of such methods for automated linguistic and philological analysis of the text, but insufficient knowledge of the specifics and actually tools of historical research. As an illustration of this thesis it is possible to mention a number of major projects carried out within the framework of the implementation of independent research, and in the framework of the European project The Time Machine.

Among the most significant prosopographic database factoing character, based on the use of ontologies and semantic networks created in the last decade include:

- Austrian projects APIS – Austrian Prosopographical/Biographical Information System (URL: https://apis.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/) ^{[160, 161]} and NAMPI – Nuns and Monks – Prosopographical Interfaces (URL: https://data.nampi.icar-us.eu/);

- French portal Studium Parisiense – which is a biographical dictionary of students of the University of Paris from the XII century to the late middle Ages (https://lamop.pantheonsorbonne.fr/axes-recherche/reseaux-et-communautes/studium-parisiense) ^[162];

project of Ghent University "the Mamluk prosopographia" XIII–XV centuries. ^[163] (in the framework of the DARIAH-BE – https://be.dariah.eu/project/mamluk-prosopography-project-mpp; part of the open data platform for the study of Islam https://ihodp.ugent.be/mpp; a Time Machine – https://www.timemachine.eu/ltm-projects/islamic-history-open-data-platform/);

- the family of a Finnish semantic portals series Sampo (https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/; Finnish National Biographies on the Semantic Web http://biografiasampo.fi/) and prosopographic database, implemented in the framework of the project Sampo (AcademySampo. Finnish Academic People 1640-1899 –https://akatemiasampo.fi/fi/; https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/yo-matrikkelit/; Finnish Prisoners of War 1939-1945 in Soviet Union – https://www.sotasampo.fi/fi/; https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/sotavangit/) ^{[164, 165]};

- American project SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context https://snaccooperative.org/), noting, in passing, that in its design and content of this resource is most actively involved NARA) ^[166].

Analyzing the evolution of prosopographic portals, it's hard not to agree with the conclusion of the Finnish researcher Eero Hyvonen (E. Hyv?nen) that in just 10 years, was replaced by two generations of semantic portals and on the approach the third generation. In the early 2010s the focus during development was on harmonization, aggregation, search and display of the data ("the system of the first generation"). Currently, the growth of prosopographic research began to shift the emphasis on providing the user with integrated tools for the solution of research tasks interactive ways ("second generation systems"). The next step to the "third generation systems", which is already visible in some of the projects will be based on the use of artificial intelligence. The portals of the third generation will not only provide data and tools to solve problems, but will focus primarily on search research questions ^[167].

The projects also logically adjacent thematic database (portals, projects) created by different structures (scientific, memorial funds, archives, museums and libraries) on the basis of documents and biographical information. Let's call only some: a Database of German immigrants (DAD) to United States (https://www.deutsche-auswanderer-datenbank.de/); the Densho project dedicated to the fates of the internees in the United States of the Japanese in world war II (http://www.densho.org); portals and databases of victims of the Holocaust (modern Czech Republic: https://www.holocaust.cz/informace-o-projektu-holocaust-cz)/), the project "the fate of prisoners of war and internees in Finland 1939-1955 gg." (http://kronos.narc.fi/index_rus.html), etc.

Summarizing the review of the development of foreign prosopographie in the 2010s, it should be noted that the two main areas of prosopographic research in this period has changed in significant ways:

- so, the project for the study of elites or small social groups always facilitates a full cycle of research: from a collection of sources, processing, and interpretation in computer-readable format, create database (context or factoids models), its analysis and synthesis, and the formation of collective biography and interpretation of results. Projects of this direction is also widely used by all the advantages of modern web technologies, innovations in digitization, recognition and markup texts, analytical procedures) is the modern technology of processing data, including OLAP (online analytical processing online analytical processing, allowing to cook and get the total (aggregated) information based on large amounts of data structured according to multi-dimensional principle), mapping the spatial distribution ^[168] and visualization ^[169], etc., but the main content of their research, the authors still believe created by a collective biography, "embedded" in the historical process and explain the role and place of the objects under study in a series of historical events ^[170].

research projects devoted to the study of the masses, often limited only by the creation of databases, presentation of information in the open data format, and illustrating the possibilities of different technologies and systems of historical sources (including archival documents) to create the resources and the processing methods of network analysis, mapping, and visualization. Unfortunately, the clinical potential of most of these resources is limited to a set originally by the authors of the project or due to the specific characteristics of the source base (attributes, criteria), which collected and formalized data and methods of automated text processing sources (data wrangling), which is built on the formal algorithms of the presence/absence information for this category, and overlook the history of the creation, completeness or fragmentation of each source and the subjectivity of its author, directly affects the accuracy of the information.

Obviously, the first approach is more holistic in terms of a historical science, and the second gives an excellent idea of the population of the historical past, but does not explain the degree of participation/influence/impact of historical persons and social groups or strata on the historical process.

The development of national historical analytical prosopographie in the 2010s was held in the framework outlined earlier trends: the expansion of the geography of researchers and a wider scope of research perspectives, but there is little technical and technological innovations.

Over the past decade, according to the RSCI, "CyberLink", American repository Academia and several aggregators scientific publications in Russia was published more than 500 articles, which in varying degrees are mentioned, the terms "prosopography", "prosopographic database/databases/system", a "collective biography", etc. it is Obvious that the figure "500" refers to the number of publications, and are not created prosopographic database or information systems, as the author/authors publish on average from 1 to 3 articles on the developed theme, and often, starting with the question "whether prosopographic database on a particular topic/social groups, strata, etc." and "methodological problems" with the development of such a database ("conceptual models"), but never actually reach its implementation on the web (if this task originally intended), processing of the collected information, retrieve the results and their interpretation and integration in historical context. However, this is only one of the problems of domestic prosopographie.

The second problem is that when there are a significant number created prosopographic database and research on Russian history, they don't form a unified picture of the historical process, even within a particular era, and the statements about the creation of some of combining these resources of information systems, as a rule, does not end.

The third problem is obvious to any attentive researcher who comes into contact with this direction: Russian historians are fatally behind their foreign colleagues in terms of technology:

- methodologically, most of the implemented projects are based on a contextual model of information, i.e. a single meta-source collected (sometimes manually), verification of information in which occurs at the preliminary source stage and is not reflected in the database in any way ^{[171, 172]};

- most of the created prosopographic databases still exist within the framework of the relational model and are implemented in the Access DBMS or DBMS logic close to it ^{[173, 174]}. At the same time, a type of research has become widespread in Russian historiography, in which databases are not created at all, and "collective biographies" (in fact, all the same static portraits, but the authors of these studies do not seem to feel the difference) are formed on the basis of manually calculated values of the studied characteristics. It is obvious that conducting such studies is possible on a very small number of studied personalities (no more than one and a half to two hundred), and conducting the analysis involves descriptive processing of a minimum number of static characteristics, i.e. without conducting your own prosopographic analytics, implying the study of dynamic indicators.;

- the use of methods of statistical analysis of relationships, network analysis, geoinformation systems, visualization, etc. is very rare, as well as the publication of created resources on the Internet. In this matter, there is also one sad trend – the systems and databases created and previously presented on the Internet are not supported by developers, disappear without a trace, or become part of larger information resources, losing their own significance (the latter is especially characteristic of archival developments). Among the relatively happy exceptions to this rule can be attributed to the resource "Zemstvo Administration of Russia" – https://zemstvohistory.ru /, developed at the Center for Digital Humanities of PSNIU, which has not been updated since 2019, but still exists online.

The reasons for this situation are obvious and lie in insufficient funding, the absence of state programs/projects for the scientific study of personalized socio-political, socio-economic and cultural national history (not to be confused with projects of publication in the media network on participants of various historical events – primarily wars), cooperation between universities, research groups, including in the absence of experience (practice) in the implementation of scientific projects with the involvement and active participation of computer scientists and mathematicians (the experience of the Laboratory for the use of mathematical methods and computers in historical research, which has been functioning since 1971 in the structure of the Institute of History of the USSR of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, as well as a similar Laboratory at the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University, subsequently transformed into the Department of Historical Informatics, practically unknown, or not adopted).

Nevertheless, characterizing this period of development of domestic analytical prosopography, taking into account and taking into account all the identified problems, it is necessary to pay attention to the following aspects.

The thematic diversity of research, as well as a wide chronological and geographical coverage: literally – from ancient history to the recent past. The main part of the research consists of works devoted to the study of elites, while there is a noticeable reduction in attention to managerial and political elites ^{[175, 176, 177]} at the national level and an increase in interest in regional elites. This trend is partly explained by the adoption and implementation in the 2010s of regional research programs, one of the directions of which was, precisely, regional studies; as well as the increasing role of federal universities established within the framework of the national project "Education" as large scientific and educational centers ^{[178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183]}.

A special place in historiography began to be occupied by the study of professional elites, while the most "popular" objects were "collective biographies" of serving people, the officer corps of different times and participants in local conflicts of the second half of the XX century, which, of course, is not an innovation of domestic prosopography ^{[184, 185]}, and has a great tradition and reflects the social request of the company ^{[186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191]}.

A certain thematic prosopographic innovation of the last decade has become the scientific elite – teachers of various universities and other educational institutions, scientists, graduate students, students, etc. ^{[192, 193, 194, 195]}. The topic has a great research tradition and historiography of study without the use of information technology, but in the 2010s this issue received a new impetus within the framework of prosopography.

At the turn of the 2000s-2010s, specialists of St. Petersburg Polytechnic University developed an original software package for storing and statistical processing of data on historical personalities - a tool for historical and biographical research ^[196], combining both approaches to database design known in Russian historiography: source-oriented and problem-oriented. The complex included a relational database stored on an SQL server and a client Web application that allows for a wide range of functionality ("client-server"), including implemented multi-user access technology, SourceSafe (in which the user can copy data from the server, work with them, and then synchronize your modified data with the database. During the capture (check out) of data, other users can only view information without the possibility of modification); Data Mining mechanisms (extracting knowledge from accumulated information) and Text Mining (text analysis), statistical analysis of lexicographic groups, search for dependent statements, allocation of cause-effect chains, etc.

On the basis of this software package, a team of authors (V.S. Sinepol, S.B. Ulyanova, I.V. Aladyshkin, N.V. Kornet) created a database of a new type – "Professors of St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, XX century", however, this study could not be found in further historiography.

The torch study of collective biographies of the faculty of the St. Petersburg schools was accepted by the specialists of the St. Petersburg state University (project Manager D. I. B. E. A. Rostovtsev), which since the early 2010s have implemented several projects on the subject, presented in real time on a single portal "a biography of the Saint-Petersburg University" (https://bioslovhist.spbu.ru/), based on which performed several analytical prosopographic studies ^{[197, 198, 199]}.

The development of the study of prosopographie faculty across Russia took place in the framework of developing a database "Professors and teachers of Russian universities (second half of XVIII — beginning of XX centuries)", created by a team of researchers from Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and Tomsk universities (compilers database: A. Y. Andreev, D. A. Barinov, M. V. Gribovskaya, I. A. Dubinsky, S. A. Nekrylov, E. A. Rostovtsev, V. I. Sidorchuk, D. A. Sosnitsky, A. O. Stepnov, S. F. Fominykh D. A. Tsygankov). Created allowed us to conduct a statistical analysis of the professorial-teaching staff, and to explore its mobility in terms of a career (job) growth and transitions from one educational institution to another ^{[200, 201]}.

A separate Chapter in the development of national historiography of prosopographie amount of work devoted to the analysis of scientific schools (application of network analysis tools) and geographical mobility of the studied objects (using GIS).

The first of those mentioned in the 2010s has experienced a kind of "reincarnation" on the new methodological level, as trying to learn it had been in the 1990s ^{[79, 80]}. However, studies performed on this subject in the second decade of the XXI century, prosopographie can be assigned with a certain degree of conditionality, since the establishment of the academic affiliation to a particular scientific school made them based on the analysis of publication activity of specific authors and their participation in research projects, the functioning of departments, work as part time creative (research) groups, etc., which, however, can be attributed to a certain "prosopographic" characteristics of the professionals that make up the professional community ^{[202, 203]}.

The second topic is the study of the mobility of the studied group of individuals – a phenomenon for the Russian historiography of prosopographie relatively new. One of the most significant from the point of view of the possibilities of technologies specific historical projects implemented on the basis of an Information retrieval system, "General review of the nobility 1721-1723 years." (http://zaharov.csu.ru/shlyah.pl) and presented online "Spatial mobility of the nobility in the era of Peter I" (https://histgeo.nextgis.com/resource/2263/display?%20panel=info&panel=layers) ^[204]. The cornerstone of this project is prosopographic database created on the basis of the object-relational DBMS PostgreSQL has a special extension PostGIS. Data of this database allowed us to create a visual representation (visualization), intensity of movement included in the study a group of people between settlements in accordance with business necessity embodied in record keeping documentation – tales of the review nobility 1721-1723 in fixing the chronology of assignments and official move of the person. The application of GIS technology to study aspects is prosopographic know how Russian historiography.

In prosopographie examine the broad groups of the population is still interest in the study of problems related to the history of political and economic repression ^{[205, 206]}. But along with that began to appear of work, in varying degrees, associated with the economic history ^[207] and the study of gender and national issues, until recently, not absolutely typical for Russian historiography ^{[208, 209]}.

The peculiarity of the development of the domestic analytical prosopographie at the present stage is the penetration of its methods in the neighboring region and the emergence of interdisciplinary studies, which are difficult to attribute to a particular scientific discipline. So, in Russian historiography appeared prosopographic and demographic studies ^[210], significantly increased the number of political and sociological work, the historical context and the use of methods of prosopographie most popular prosopographia got in library science ^{[211, 212]}, there was a literary-prosopographic ^[213], journalism, expert prosopographic ^[214] and the philosophical and prosopographic study ^[215], etc.

A second wind in the 2010-ies have been developed already created and creating new databases and portals with biographical information, developed on the basis of archival documentation ^[216]. This, along with major state and national resources ("the Memory of the people," HBS "memorial", the "Immortal regiment" (https://www.moypolk.ru/), "the memory of the heroes of the great war, 1914-1918" (https://gwar.mil.ru/about/) "memory Road" (https://doroga.mil.ru/). The latter project was created by the Ministry of defence of the Russian Federation and is designed to perpetuate the memory of all the participants of the great Patriotic war. The resource includes not only biographical information, but also a photo gallery and operates on the basis of crowdsourcing), actively created by a relatively small database.

A unique example of the implementation of source-oriented approach to the formation of archival information resource can be seen in the database "Karelian refugees" (http://www.rkna.ru/exhibitions/ktk/bd.html), implemented in the National archives of the Republic of Karelia within the framework of the project "From commune to the Republic" (http://www.rkna.ru/exhibitions/ktk/bd.html). Perhaps for the first time in the practice of the create backup databases and presenting them to the Internet resource, the authors note that "Fairly typical situation when one person existed two or three names, and much the same modifications of the names: all of the options available in the application forms and accompanying documents added to the database. In that case, if several documents are cited various information (for example, a different year of birth), in the database the second value listed with a question mark. Square brackets enclose information that can have a different reading because of the characteristics of handwriting" (http://www.rkna.ru/exhibitions/ktk/bd.html). In addition, in the "note" field the authors of the resource clearly indicate the document information which is transferred to the database, or see the sources of discrepancies.

However, such an approach in the formation of the database of rare. As a rule, in practice, when creating such resources archivists use a "context model", which involves the formation of a single database (MetaStock) on the basis of verification and information from different types of automatic complexes of documents stored in the archives.

When learning Russian historiography of prosopographie 2010s, it should be noted popularity of this direction of research and fondamentale, increasing the amount of work performed with the involvement of the prosopographic method, and resources that create and publish the network could be the beginning of implementation of research findings. However, it is clearly noticeable the lack of a unified methodological coordinating center for scientific research, the fragmentation of research tasks, incomplete and fragmentary source base, methodological and technological gap, superficial conclusions, often wearing summative in nature, which is simple to research problems, lack of in-depth analysis and historical interpretation of the results. All this, of course, causes some harm to prosopographie as a scientific discipline, has tremendous research potential.

Instead of conclusion

Summing up the discussion of the history and historiography of prosopographie, as well as describing in General, the proposed periodization prosopographic studies, it seems appropriate to emphasize that

prosopographia as a method and interdisciplinary direction in the system of modern socio-humanitarian research currently going through one of the peaks of popularity due to General trends in the historical Sciences (including anthropology and pragmatic turns), as well as the unique capabilities of this method, namely:

· historicity is a characteristic feature of all prosopographic studies, regardless of the traditions of the discipline which the work was performed;

· a combination of micro and macropodoidea, the ability to study the socio-political, socio-cultural, socio-demographic and socio-geographical aspects in the conditions of dynamic changes in a single study;

· scalability of the research object and the source base;

· the ability to use different types of automatic complexes of historical sources, innovative tools work with historical sources and transparent verification of the information;

· the ability to incorporate modern information technologies and methods of other disciplines;

· and finally, openness and used data analysis tools, the possibility of secondary use of data collected, as well as public presentation of the results of completed projects.

- a variant of periodization of prosopographie is one of many that can be designed in the context of this topic and the application of various criteria for the selection stages. This option is applicable for both domestic and foreign history of the development of prosopographie – method and research areas, making this periodization is most reasonable.