THE THREE STAGES

Hence there are three stages to prosopography as it has come to be understood.

First Stage

The first stage is:
to define the groups or groups to be studied, to determine the sources to be used from as wide a range as possible, and to formulate the questions to be asked.

These issues are inextricably linked: there can be no prosopography that is not firmly rooted in its sources; the nature and type of source available will determine the nature and type of question that can eventually be asked of the assembled data.

This stage demands great care and patience since it underpins the whole prosopography. Decisions will be taken, and carefully recorded, about how to extract the core name data from the sources, and how to represent this and any other desired data in tabular form. This is the "data-modelling" stage that will determine the structure of stage 2, and make possible the analysis of correlates that occurs in stage 3.