The speech approaches biographies as a source for studies on intellectual history. First, it reviews shortly via an example, what new digital history tools, such as the semantic web, provide for doing institutional history. Secondly, it discusses how biographies are usually about the elite: the richest, most powerful, best educated or mostly trained group of a society. On the other hand, besides biographies, also autobiographies are the core material in writing and analysing the histories of universities, associations, companies, organisations, philanthropic institutions, or other prosopography clusters. In combining these kinds of writings, you may be able to reveal the lives between the private and public spheres.