The idea for the Seeing Syllabi project grew out of brainstorming sessions with some colleagues (Steve Brauer, Christine Tulley, Zac Zimmer, and Michael Simeone, any of whom may rejoin our efforts at some point) at the Digital Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory, an NEH-funded summer workshop hosted between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of South Carolina at Columbia. With an initial goal of extending the functionality of existing course and content management systems, I originally envisioned a suite of tools that would incorporate a searchable and analytics-ready corpus of syllabi into a robust and collaborative course creation system. Two linked features were included in the initial proposal: 1) a graphical, unit-based course creation and scheduling tool that enables student and instructor inputs and 2) a tool to produce interactive visualizations of data drawn from significant corpora of syllabi and other course documents.