The interdisciplinary methodology applied in this project involve methods of papyrology, ancient history, legal theory and history, and sociology. An important part of the investigation will be Social Network Analysis (SNA), aimed at identifying structures or local patterns governing a given social network.
Since the project is aimed at tracing socio-legal networks and legal phenomena within the social networks, the choice of documents for detailed investigation is limited to texts of legal character (various agreements, wills, receipts of payment, acknowledgments of debt, etc.). Raw data gathered from the papyri is further collected and managed with the use of a database that contains a set of actors and relations (‘nodes’ and ‘edges’ in the language of SNA), as well as additional information, such as the affiliation of the actors and their social standing. The reasons for such organisation of the material is to generate visualisations of the studied networks that allow for the identification of the most pertinent or prevalent types of relations between the actors.