J.A.H.

Hi, I'm Jason A. Heppler, environmental historian of the twentieth century North American West, Great Plains, and Canadian Prairies. I am the senior developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, adjunct faculty in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, and an Affiliate Fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Jason Heppler

My latest books —

Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High Tech Urbanism book cover

Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism

The environmental inequalities of Silicon Valley's post-World War II development.

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Digital Community Engagement book cover

Digital Community Engagement

Case studies on campus-community partnerships and the creation of digital humanities projects.

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Find more of my work on my scholarship page or my CV.

Recent Essays —

Generative AI and the Work of History Dec 2025

Generative AI lacks the ability to understand context, historical ambiguity, and cannot generate new knowledge, rendering it inadequate for certain kinds of historical research and meaningless for education.

Friction Jan 2025

Migrating to Micro.blog made writing easier and more productive.

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academia, advocacy, american historical association, american indian movement, american life, american west, apple, applescript, artificial intelligence, bash, bibtex, bicycling, career, coffee, commonplace, conference, conferences, data, data visualization, design, development, dhsi, digital history, digital humanities, dissertation, django, dpla, endangered data week, environment, farm life, federal lands, focus, gaming, golang, health, history harvest, hugo, indie web, interview, javascript, jquery, labor, latex, libraries, linkblog, maps, meta, midwest, mozilla, narrative, net neutrality, newsletter, obsidian, omaha, omeka, open access, open data, pandoc, pdf, peer review, personal, place, plain text, podcasts, poetry, politics, presentation, productivity, programming, public lands, public history, python, ranching, re placing, reading, repair and maintain, research, restoration, review, rrchnm, ruby, silicon valley, sopa, spatial history, superfund, tack and ink, teaching, tech life, technology, text analysis, thatcamp, theology, thesis, twoquotes, unions, vim, web, web scraping, wendell berry, western history association, writing

Recent Notes —

My Ideal Library Jan 2026

Reflecting on my personal library, the space serves as both a home office and creative studio.

“Fluent and Stranded” Jan 2026

Current large language models can produce convincing dialogue but struggle to create meaningful new ideas, often resulting in nonsensical exchanges akin to absurdist theater.

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Recent Reading —

Bad Mexicans Kelly Lytle Hernández 2022
What We Can Know Ian McEwan 2025
The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry 1978
Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry 2010
The Undiscovered Country Paul Andrew Hutton 2025

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