Douglas, I suspect you’re right about the Jefferson’s Travels site being the thing Richard’s thinking of. I was excited to realize that Bill Ferster, who is largely responsible for the programming behind the Travels site will also be at THATCamp. I’ve certainly seen the project in action, but I came late into the thing–this will give us a chance to really sit down and talk it out.

You also raise a good point about asking specific questions. Off hand, the biggest driver guiding my interest in these areas is around trying to get a handle on the mass of data presented in Jefferson’s correspondence. In an ideal world, we would develop tools that would illuminate in a largely automatic way the thematic, temporal, and spatial connections among Jefferson’s correspondents (and correspondence). I’m interested in understanding large patterns and rhythms, and if that can be shown in ways that don’t require a manual examination of 40000-plus letters, I’m all for it. It may be a while before we can move off of a letter-by-letter examination, but the discussions of semantic tools give me hope for down the road (and I have no problem with iterative development, with manual effort at first and automated effort later).

It would be great if out of these conversations a suite of tools were made available that would work for ANY set of correspondence (or other written texts). That would certainly be the kind of shared direction I think you’re getting at, Lisa.

This topic interests me greatly, and Eric has set up a number of productive questions. I wonder about a tension between curation and standardization. On the one hand, it would seem to be more efficient to plan for generalized representation and visualization tools that could spin out into a “giant killer spiderweb of correspondence.” But on the other hand, why do these contexts and connections warrant the effort to digitally represent them? What specifically do we want to learn or teach about Jefferson, or about history through Jefferson, that we don’t already know yet? Having particular questions in mind will cause the tool-building to go in certain directions that it wouldn’t necessarily go otherwise. But then highly curated tools in the service of a hypothesis or argument or specific direction of inquiry may be less generalizable.

Have you seen the Finnish Culture Sampo site? It may of limited use to non-Finnish speakers, but the English interface at least lets you browse around and see the possibilities.

Their Museums and the Web paper (and presentation) are available at: www.archimuse.com/mw2009/abstracts/prg_335001985.html

This goes beyond just texts by also connecting material culture objects together (e.g. a painting that depicts a scene from a famous poem, or in your case maybe we could also link to the image of the desk upon which Jefferson wrote).

Also, I thought I saw something at HASTAC that had plotted Jefferson’s travels and correspondence on a map.

Katz’s column is presumably a continuation of the discussion that launched into the public sphere with this Washington Post article among others and resulted in this report from the National Archives (something I hadn’t seen until your link prompted me to go poking around!).

chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/katz/government-and-scholarship

It sounds like the federal government is going to take over or coordinate the digitization of the papers of the founding fathers. I hope you get to be involved.

[What is going online are digitized versions of Princeton University Press’s Papers of Thomas Jefferson, the definitive scholarly edition of all of Jefferson’s correspondence. We have a parallel project here at Monticello tackling his retirement-era correspondence. Right now, everything from his earliest correspondence as a young man to the first eight weeks of his first presidential term is available online.]

Some of the basic connections, such as hyperlinking between related letters (“I received yours of the 13th inst and was much obliged . . .”), should be do-able as a matter of course. I’m especially interested in trying to pick people’s brains on other, more dynamic and expansive ways in which documents might be connected to one another (in other words, what would you as a user be interested in seeing?) and in picking brains on technical ways it can be done. And my bigger yet more nebulous question: how can we provide easily-accessible context “around” these primary source documents?