older prosopography with what in 1971 was the newer form of quantitative prosopography, which concern was with much wider populations including, particularly, "ordinary people". An example of this kind of work, published slightly later, is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's pioneering work of microhistory, Montaillou (1975), which developed a picture of patterns of kinship and heresy, daily and seasonal routine, in a small Occitan village, the last pocket of Cathars, over a 30-year period from 1294 to 1324. Stone anticipated that this new form of prosopography would become dominant as part of a growing wave of social science history. But prosopography and other associated forms of social science and quantitative history went into a period of decline during the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, perhaps because of developments in computing, and particularly in database software, prosopography was revived. The "new prosopography" has since become clearly established as an important approach in historical research. Data in prosopographical research A certain mass of data is required for prosopographical research. The collection of data underlies the creation of a prosopography and, in contemporary research, this is usually in the form of an electronic database. But data assembly is not the goal of the research; rather, the objective is to understand patterns and relationships by analysing the data. A uniform set of criteria needs to be applied to the group in order to achieve meaningful results. And, as with any historical study, understanding the context of the lives studied is essential. In the words of prosopographer Katharine Keats-Rohan, "prosopography is about what the analysis of the sum of data about many individuals can tell us about the different types of connection between them, and hence about how they operated within and upon the institutions—social, political, legal, economic, intellectual—of their time". In this sense prosopography is clearly related to, but distinct from, both biography and genealogy. Whilst biography and prosopography overlap, and prosopography is interested in the details of individuals' lives, a prosopography is more than the plural of biography. A prosopography is not just any collection of biographies. The lives of the research subjects must have enough in common for relationships and connections to be uncovered. Genealogy, as practiced by family historians, has as its goal the reconstruction of familial relationships, and as such, well-conducted genealogical research may form the basis of a prosopography. See also Big data Historiography Prosopographical network References Sources Abbott, Josie