Jason A. Heppler / Homepage / micro.blog / GitHub / Gist / Stack Overflow / Observable

I'm Jason Heppler, a web developer, writer, and historian working at the intersection of history, computation, data visualization, and public history. I am the senior developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (@CHNM) at George Mason University and affiliate fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

I'm an environmental historian of the North American West and Great Plains with an interest in landscapes and the ways that people enact (and react) to changes to the land. My second book is an environmental history of Silicon Valley following World War II that looks at the significance of nature in social, cultural, and economic conceptions of place, as well as being a case study on the origins of American environmentalism and debates about urban and suburban sustainability. Nowadays I find myself writing environmental histories of the Great Plains, Canadian Prairies, and American West. I have been a digital historian for over ten years and am expert in the ways computation, data, and design can be employed to help us understand space and place through maps, texts, visual culture, and public history.

Most of my day to day work is found in the repositories for RRCHNM. In my repos, you can find other pieces of my research:

• Machines in the Valley: Web files and data visualization for my book on Silicon Valley.
• Sagebrush: My latest in-progress work related to my research on the Sagebrush Rebellion.
• Oskate Wicasa: My on-going work about Indigenous peoples hired by William F. Cody's Wild West Exhibition.
• Framing Red Power: Web files and data analysis for my first digital history project.
• What is Digital Humanities?: Perpetual answers to the perpetual question.
• Files for my website and my website's micro.blog theme.
• My dotfiles / NeoVIM and my CV.

You can read more about me, check out my books and articles, my other digital history and data visualization projects, or subscribe to my newsletter Tack & Ink.

Please consider supporting my work.