I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ways to get primary source documents to “talk” to each other and to the cloud of secondary sources that surround them.  For example, at Monticello we’re working on a digital version of Jefferson’s memorandum books (60 years’ worth of purchases made, places visited, people seen, etc.) and want to enrich it far beyond simply getting the text on the web.  Can we make that incredible information come alive in a rich and user-friendly way?  Put these and other primary sources into a broader context of people, events, ideas?  Connect these seamlessly with secondary sources treating the same topics?  Can we decentralize the process to pull information from non-Monticello assets?  What visualization tools will help?

Or another version of the same “problem.”  Thomas Jefferson wrote between eighteen and nineteen thousand letters in his lifetime and received several times that number from other writers.  What are ways to illuminate the connections among those letters?  What are ways to permit an easy understanding of the larger (political, social, material, geographic) contexts in which that correspondence took place?  Are there good tools that will let people explore letters by theme?  And beyond that, can the same solutions be applied to other correspondents at other times in other places (and, ultimately, turned into a giant killer spiderweb of correspondence)?