Learning about historical figures is usually carried out in one of two ways. Either you spend hours digging through primary and secondary sources and slowly piece together and deep and nuanced understanding of that person or you read/watch/listen to an edited narrative about their life. The former can be rich and rewarding, but also is tedious and time-consuming. The latter, however much quicker and simpler it is to take in, is often unsatisfactory. The editer of the finished narrative must make choices about what is more important, what is more interesting, and what material should be left out. Additionally, their choices about how to frame the narrative, as well as how they choose to order and present it, colours in the picture they paint of the figure's life to a great extent.

This website attempts to explore an alternative way of looking at historical figures. By offering the viewer the ability to easily navigate the primary sources in an open way by date, by subject, by cross-reference, or by simple chronological order, the narrative is constructed by the viewer in a way that is interesting and relevant to them.

This type of work has other secondary uses. For example, it offers an opportunity for research to have easy access to the primary sources and to make connections between the letters quickly through searching or by updating the cross-reference word list. Another use would be as an educational tool. Many games could be easily created that would make learning about historical personalities more fun and more relevant for students. For example, there could be a mode that asked the student to find out whether or not the historical person engaged in a certain activity (did Sarah Stretch cure pork, for example) and to find proof for or against that claim in the primary sources.

This open approach assumes that a viewer will be more interested and will learn more about an individual if they can follow their own path to understanding than if an edited narrative is handed to them. It risks that something "important" in the subjects life may be "missed" by the viewer, for example if they do not know that Sarah's son Robert had trouble with ringworm, they may not know to search for it. These issues can be mitigated to a large extent by providing suggested search terms. Moreover, it humbles the historians voice and agency in deciding what "must be said" and what is less important. The viewer is allowed to make those decisions for themselves.