Essays + Posts

Jason A. Heppler

8 January 2026 How I Use Obsidian Redux

An update on how I use Obsidian for historical research.

22 December 2025 Generative AI and the Work of History

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.

27 February 2025 The Farmall H Restoration, February Update

A February update on the 1946 Farmall H restoration.

21 January 2025 Friction

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

4 January 2025 The blog's themes, summarized

Summarizing my blog tags around key themes in my writing.

27 December 2024 Year of Foundations

15 July 2024 How I Use Obsidian

Creating my research and note-taking environment

23 May 2024 Made by Me

Generative AI shows potential as a tool for synthesis and analysis in history, but we should remain skeptical about its utility and ethical implications.

21 May 2024 Reflections on Becoming a Django Developer

Thoughts and experiences on becoming a Django developer.

1 November 2023 Spoiled Fruits: Environmental Inequality in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley's postwar development created landscapes of stark environmental inequality — prosperity and pollution distributed along racial and class lines.

19 March 2023 Weekend Update

Some design updates and a new dark mode switcher!

26 January 2023 The Year of Work

Defining my yearly theme for 2023.

19 December 2022 Yearly Theme

16 October 2022 Creativity and AI

What happens if seemingly historical objects online are entirely unreal?

11 October 2022 Elden Ring

12 January 2022 Towards a Stable Set of Tools

I find myself using more stock tools.

17 November 2021 Twitter Use at WHA2021

Analyzing Twitter during #WHA2021.

19 October 2021 Turning 30

28 May 2021 Union

17 May 2021 New Role: Developer at RRCHNM

I am thrilled to announce I'm joining RRCHNM!

19 October 2020 Twitter Use at WHA2020

Analyzing Twitter during #WHA2020.

7 May 2020 Superfund Package

I'm releasing my in-progress dataset on Superfunds as an R package.

27 March 2020 Basecamp

30 November 2019 The IndieWeb

Doubling down on the Indie Web.

8 November 2019 Paper notes

How I take and manage paper notes.

22 October 2019 Twitter Use at WHA2019

Analyzing Twitter during #WHA2019.

26 April 2019 How Silicon Valley Provides the Blueprint for Cleaning Up Our Drinking Water

The region's long history of industrial contamination — and the legal battles it spawned — offers a model for communities confronting polluted groundwater today.

23 October 2018 Twitter Use at WHA2018

Analyzing Twitter during #WHA2018.

2 March 2018 Advocacy, Training, and Awareness Through Endangered Data Week

An essay co-authored with Brandon Locke, Sarah Melton, and Rachel Mattson on data advocacy and the annual Endangered Data Week initiative.

14 November 2017 How Silicon Valley Industry Polluted the Sylvan California Dream

Long before Silicon Valley became synonymous with tech startups, it was orchards and aerospace — and the chemicals that came with both.

18 August 2017 Arguing with Digital History

My contribution to the working paper on arguing with digital history.

5 July 2017 Standing up for Net Neutrality

The dismantling of net neutrality is bad for the web.

6 June 2017 Mapping Midwest

An overview of the keynote address I gave at the 2017 Midwestern History Conference.

24 April 2017 Introducing Endangered Data Week

How you can get involved with Endangered Data Week.

22 September 2016 Homecoming

I'm excited to announce my new role at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

26 August 2016 Syllabus for Teaching Digital Public History

My syllabus for Stanford's Digital Public History.

9 February 2016 My Open History Notebook

I made an open notebook with Jekyll.

6 January 2016 Federal Policy, Western Lands, and Malheur

The federal government administer's a lot of public lands.

28 September 2015 Visualizing the Wars of the United States

A timeline of American wars.

18 January 2015 Humanistic Approaches to Data Visualization

My presentation at the d3.digitalhumanities() meetup in San Francisco.

10 January 2015 Interview with Matt Burton

My interview with Matt Burton.

2 January 2015 The Machines in the Valley Digital History Project

Announcing the release of my dissertation's digital history component.

30 October 2014 Research Design and Geography of the Post

How and why we designed Geography of the Post.

30 June 2014 Editorial is a Powerful, Flexible iOS App for Text Editing

Editorial is a great tool for iOS-based text editing.

23 June 2014 Use Copy for Cloud Storage Backup and File Sharing

Copy is a great cloud storge service.

4 June 2014 What Does Missile Command Have to do with Digital History?

What can an old arcade game tell us about history in the digital age?

8 April 2014 Day of DH: The Collaborative Historian

My Day of DH 2014.

8 April 2014 Day of DH: The Spatial Historian

My Day of DH 2014.

22 February 2014 Western History and the California Drought

A historical perspective on the California drought and what it can teach us about western history and sustainability.

17 December 2013 Digital History Interview with BlogWest

My interview with Michael Childers at BlogWest.

30 October 2013 Converting Plain Text to PDF with Bash

Create great-looking PDFs from Markdown with Pandoc and LaTeX.

18 October 2013 Digital History at Stanford

Launching Stanford's initiatives in digital history.

2 October 2013 My Alt-Ac Life

My work as a digital historian at Stanford.

21 August 2013 Using Editorial and Bibkeys Together

Using Editorial with Bibkeys for citation management.

20 May 2013 On Tornadoes

In 1998, a tornado practically wiped a city off the map.

28 April 2013 The Digital Public Library of America

Using the DPLA for research, teaching, and creating.

17 March 2013 Interview for Digital History@Rice

My interview with Caleb McDaniel.

8 January 2013 Defining Digital Humanities

My new project providing perpetual answers to the perpetual question.

7 December 2012 Using Text Expansion in My Research Workflow

Using TextExpander to work with markdown efficiently.

3 December 2012 New Job, Joining Stanford

I could not be more excited to announce that I'm joining Stanford University!

24 November 2012 Using AppleScript to Automate Notetaking

Extracting PDF highlights to markdown with AppleScript.

20 November 2012 Using Markdown Like an Academic

Plain text should rule your writing life.

10 October 2012 Building Your Own Memex

How I manage information.

13 August 2012 Towards Better PDF Management with the Filesystem

Using the filesystem to manage your journal PDFs.

11 July 2012 What I've Learned as an Academic Blogger

Blogging has taught me a lot.

21 May 2012 Forking the Rubyist Historian

My open access book on Ruby programming for historians.

5 February 2012 Journals in the Digital Age

Some thoughts on the role of academic journals in the digital age.

22 January 2012 Redefining Scholarship in the Digital Age

Please consider endorsing our call for the AHA to evaluate the role of digital scholarship in peer review, tenure, and promotion.

18 January 2012 Standing Against SOPA

The Stop Online Piracy Act is bad legislation, and bad for the web.

31 December 2011 New Year

It's time to re-center my attention.

17 December 2011 Legacy Research

Plain text ensures longevity.

7 December 2011 Directions in Digital Humanities Research

How I plan to incorporate digital history into my research on William F. Cody.

1 December 2011 Alone Together

Let's not let machines dictate who we are.

17 November 2011 Who Controls the Master Switch

A reading reflection of Tim Wu for HIST946.

9 November 2011 What My lolcat Ate For Breakfast

A reading reflection on the state of the web for HIST946.

3 November 2011 The Architecture of Humanities Cyberspace

A reading reflection on Lawrence Lessig for HIST946.

25 October 2011 The Obligation of Open Access

I've signed the Open Access pledge.

20 October 2011 Latour and the Social

A reading reflection on Bruno Latour for HIST946.

12 October 2011 Models for Narrative in Digital Humanities

A reading reflection on Franco Moretti for HIST946.

6 October 2011 SpecLab and Digital Aesthetics

A few examples of what I think are great design in digital humanities.

28 September 2011 Spatial Humanities and Visual Narratives

A reading reflection on spatial history for HIST946.

22 September 2011 Information and Data in the Digital Age

A reflection on data for HIST946.

14 September 2011 Electronic Text and the Digital Humanities

Reflecting on a collection of readings for HIST946.

4 September 2011 The Medium of Digital Humanities

A thought piece on Marshall McLuhan for HIST946.

1 September 2011 Organizing Knowledge and the Future of the Humanities

A reflection on knowledge for HIST946.

4 August 2011 Constructing a Digital Humanists' C.V.

Building a CV for the digital humanities.

22 July 2011 Using Notational Velocity

The perfect piece of software.

29 June 2011 Grown Up Computing

Marco Arment on the difference between 'young' and 'grown-up' computing.

10 May 2011 Designing Digital History

How should we consider the role of design in digital history?

3 May 2011 Longform Writing on the Web

Can we replicate longform writing on the web?

19 April 2011 Migrating to Jekyll

I've moved from Wordpress to Jekyll. Here's how I did it.

15 March 2011 Initial Thoughts on TileMill

A quick review of TileMill by Mapbox.

2 March 2011 Digital History and Continuous Deployment

Digital history is an ongoing process of refinement, narrative, and archiving.

1 March 2011 Why I Don't Use A Commenting System

There's no comments here. Just email me.

12 January 2011 The Rubyist Historian: Our First Program

The Rubyist Historian: Creating our first program!

8 January 2011 The Rubyist Historian: Randomness

The Rubyist Historian: Introduction to recursion and other random things.

7 January 2011 The Rubyist Historian: Working With Advanced Data

The Rubyist Historian: Working with inputs and outputs.

4 January 2011 The Rubyist Historian: Arrays and Hashes

The Rubyist Historian: Introduction to arrays and hashes.

2 January 2011 The Rubyist Historian: Loops and Control Structures

The Rubyist Historian: An introduction to loops and controls.

31 December 2010 The Rubyist Historian: Methods and Classes

The Rubyist Historian: Introducing Ruby classes and methods.

29 December 2010 The Rubyist Historian: Getting Started

The Rubyist Historian: How to get started with Ruby.

10 December 2010 The Rubyist Historian: The Series

The Rubyist Historian: An introduction to the series.

3 December 2010 How I Learned Code

Here's how a historian learned to be a programmer.

8 October 2010 Open Access Scholarship and Computers in the Humanities

The web holds an exciting promise for history, if we reach for it.

25 October 2009 Tool Review: TokenX and Language Analysis

Using TokenX in historical research.

7 September 2009 Tool Review: Google Earth for Digital Historians

How Google Earth might be used by historians.

3 June 2009 Digital History as a Research Methodology

How I incorporated digital history into my Master's thesis.

18 December 2008 Framing Red Power: Newspapers and the Trail of Broken Treaties

Annoucing my digital history project, Framing Red Power.

29 November 2008 How To: Designing Digital History

Thoughts on the role of design and digital history.

8 November 2008 Open Source Scholarship, and Why History Should Be Open Source

Digital history is, by its very nature, open.

8 November 2008 The Dell Mini 9: A Historian's Review

A review of the new Dell Mini 9.

2 May 2008 Kindle as a Metaphore for the History Web

Can the Kindle serve as a metaphor for digital history?

23 April 2008 The Challenge of Digital History

Historians have to play a role in defining good history on the web.

8 April 2008 Bobley Visits UNL

Brett Bobley paid us a visit to talk about the new NEH Office of Digital Humanities.