Such questions hold a natural interest for prosopographers, who can then begin to look for certain characteristics –class, office, occupation, gender, faction, ethnic background – and identify patterns of connectivity that they might have otherwise missed when confronted with a mass of data too large for normal synthetic approaches.
Claude Nicolet defined the main of prosopography as the history of groups as elements in political and social history, achieved by isolating series of persons having certain political or social characteristics in common and then analyzing each series in terms of multiple criteria, in order both to obtain information specific to individuals and to identify the constants and the variables among the data for whole groups.
[3] According to British historian Lawrence Stone, prosopography had become a two-fold tool for historical research: 1) it helps to unveil interests and connections hidden or unclear in the narrative (i.e. rhetoric, historiography, etc.
For both uses, understanding connections and studying the evolution of a group, network analysis presents a helpful and feasible methodological framework for measuring quantities and interpreting data.
The sociological focus, despite the vast spectrum of tools and methods at its disposal, does not deal with limited extraction of relational data from fragmentary and even contradictory sources.