Biography
A biography (or simply "bio") is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death, but also portrays a subject's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.
Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Works in diverse media, from literature to film, form the genre known as biography.
An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and at times, participation of a subject or a subject's heirs. An autobiography is written by the person himself or herself, sometimes with the assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter.
History
At first, biographical writings were regarded merely as a subsection of history with a focus on a particular individual of historical importance. The independent genre of biography as distinct from general history writing began to emerge in the 18th century and reached its contemporary form at the turn of the 20th century.
Biographical research
Biographical research is defined by Miller as a research method that collects and analyses a person's whole life, or portion of a life, through the in-depth and unstructured interview, or sometimes reinforced by semi-structured interviews or personal documents. It is a way of viewing social life in procedural terms, rather than static terms. The information can come from "oral history, personal narrative, biography and autobiography" or "diaries, letters, memoranda, and other materials". The central aim of biographical research is to produce rich descriptions of persons or "conceptualize structural types of actions" which means to "understand the action logics or how persons and structures are interlinked". And this method can be used to understand an individual’s life within its social context or understand the cultural phenomena.
See also [ Hagiography ]
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