Talk:Prosopography

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Being a rookie at cite.php, could someone with more experience change Note 2? The classic series of volumes is of course Prosopographia Imperii Romani, and it deals with the Roman Principate, as opposed to the Principiate. Thanks. Thomas78 17:02, 20 March 2007 (UTC)Thomas78

Revision

The intro is WAY too long, and needs to be given a section title. I"m not familiar enough with this topic to do so, but pelase, get a section title. ThuranX 20:22, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with the subject either, but after reading the article I felt 'History of prosopography' would be the best title for this section, so added it in. Terraxos 20:03, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Ubi sunt Romani?

What happened to the stuff about prosopography of ancient Rome? I have links to this article that are now less helpful. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:03, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Needs to be broadened

Except for the mention of Erben's piece on 19th century England, the assumption in the article seems to be that prosopography is expected to deal almost exclusively with classical & medieval topics. This is an outdated view. At the point where academic history and serious genealogical research meet, there has been, for a couple of decades, considerable use of prosopographical methods in analyzing communities and extended family groups. This has been done (and published about) regarding the Plymouth settlement, the Missouri Ozarks, the counties of Texas that border the Red River, and the Boonesboro settlement in Kentucky. And that's just what comes to mind. I guess I'll have to find time to extend the coverage, but I hope other readers will add a note pointing to other modern-era prosopographical studies that ought to be included. --Michael K Smith^Talk 14:27, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Potential redesign

I don't think the current structure of this page makes a lot of sense: bits of the disciplinary history are scattered into other sections, for example. There are also some flaws in the presentation - whilst Stone was important, generally Mommsen and the PIR are taught as the starting point for the discipline, and Stone was commenting on an already well established idea and field by the 1970s.

My suggestion would be to follow the introduction with a "definitions" section defining prosopography and its purpose in more detail, and then have the history and development of the discipline after that, before going onto the practice of the discipline and things like data usage? I'll try and find time to do this in the coming weeks if nobody objects. JamesMatthewBaillie (talk) 11:54, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Splitting out Factoids again

I noticed that someone merged the Factoid Model article in here, citing the neologisms rule and the brevity of the FM article. This doesn't make good sense for a number of reasons. First, they're just different concepts albeit connected ones. The Factoid Model was developed for prosopography, but there's no conceptual reason why you couldn't use it for a gazetteer of places or an events list. Second, whilst the FM is the only model that's had sufficient discussion in the literature to reference a Wikipedia article properly with, that's in large part because a lot of other projects just have very undertheorised models: having a section on the Factoid Model and no others within this page gives, I think, an incorrect impression of the balance of usage in the field. Third, this has been a major principle in this field since I was in primary school: if people had concerns with the referencing or wanted to ask for wider referencing of the topic it would have been appropriate to raise that on the FM article page, but the suggestion that its Wikipedia article is promoting a neologism is decidedly curious to me.

I therefore propose to split out the Factoid Model article again: I'll wait for a day or two before doing so, in case anyone wants to raise an objection on this talk page. JamesMatthewBaillie (talk) 11:54, 20 October 2025 (UTC)