Essays, Posts, & Notes

Jason A. Heppler

24 March 2026 Restoring Old Digital History

Using LLMs to clean up my early research projects

9 March 2026 Vibing Digital History

What if it Just Works?

5 March 2026 The Obsidian-Hugo Workflow

Setting up Obsidian, Hugo, and Cloudflare for my website.

2 March 2026 A New Design for Readability

Design updates for 2026

2 March 2026 Computers Can't Surprise

Creativity belongs to the humans.

27 January 2026 My Ideal Library

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

11 January 2026 “Fluent and Stranded”

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

8 January 2026 How I Use Obsidian Redux

An update on how I use Obsidian for historical research.

27 December 2025 Two Quotations on Interfaces

Excessive removal of friction from digital technology has diminished meaningful experiences.

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.

12 December 2025 The Christmas Movie Rotation

Our varied selection of Christmas movies we watch each year.

25 October 2025 Two Quotes on the Land

Quotes on the land by Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey

27 February 2025 The Farmall H Restoration, February Update

A February update on the 1946 Farmall H restoration.

20 February 2025 Living in the News

The importance of prioritizing local and immediate experiences over consuming excessive news and global events to maintain perspective and reclaim attention.

3 February 2025 Recovering U.S. Government Data and Websites

Endangered Data Week was founded to address threats to publicly available data, and while it has ended, efforts to archive vulnerable datasets continue, as highlighted by a recent NY Times article on missing government websites.

21 January 2025 Own Your Turf

The urgent need for decentralized social media platforms that resist censorship and allow user control has become increasingly clear.

21 January 2025 Friction

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

21 January 2025 Lamentable Word

Charlie Stross and Alan Jacobs on how Microsoft Word hinders the writing and editing process for authors and publishers alike.

21 January 2025 Two Quotes on Owning Your Turf

The urgent need for decentralized social media platforms that resist censorship and allow user control has become increasingly clear.

19 January 2025 Returning to Firefox

4 January 2025 The blog's themes, summarized

Summarizing my blog tags around key themes in my writing.

27 December 2024 Year of Foundations

26 November 2024 Year-End Tech Report

8 November 2024 Becoming News-Resilient

2 November 2024 The Return of the Prairie Populists

11 October 2024 The Legacies of the Bundyville Stand-off

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.

20 January 2024 Are Print Books the New (Old) Authority?

Thinking about the future of printed books and the need for authority in light of inaccurate AI-generated content.

17 December 2023 My Next Book's Publication Date

My second book is coming in April 2024.

29 November 2023 Default Apps for 2023

A list of my preferred apps and tools for 2023.

20 November 2023 Building my Writing Study

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.

24 October 2023 63rd Annual Western History Association Conference

30 May 2023 Adding Conservation to BLM Land

30 May 2023 Where I've Been

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

15 December 2022 Updating My RSS

The demise of Twitter seems to lead to RSS's resurgence.

8 December 2022 The Agency of Ice

23 November 2022 Running my Reading Log

How I manage my reading log.

22 November 2022 Web People

19 November 2022 0 Tweets

It's time to leave Twitter.

18 November 2022 Embracing the Limits

9 November 2022 Thinking on the Collapse of Twitter

16 October 2022 Creativity and AI

What happens if seemingly historical objects online are entirely unreal?

11 October 2022 Elden Ring

24 June 2022 Developer Notes: A quick and dirty text diff

Ever need to compare two pieces of text? There's an easy way to do it in VSCode.

23 June 2022 The URL is a Radical Act

The web enables the act of visiting and revisiting, lowering the barriers of participation.

14 May 2022 COVID

28 April 2022 Day of DH 2022

My Day of Digital Humanities for 2022.

11 February 2022 Developer Notes: Converting Filenames to Metadata

Using Bash to quickly convert filenames into metadata.

12 January 2022 Towards a Stable Set of Tools

I find myself using more stock tools.

29 December 2021 The Break from Twitter

22 December 2021 Julebordet

16 December 2021 Christmas Tunes

25 November 2021 A Day of Mourning

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 April 2020 Moments

27 March 2020 Basecamp

19 February 2020 BootcampR

12 February 2020 Email

10 February 2020 Democratic Typography

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.

23 June 2019 Omaha Zoning

Mapping Omaha's single-family zoning versus multifamily zoning.

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.

8 February 2019 Making my Budget Peloton

Armed with a Sunny Health bike, cadence monitor, and iPhone, you can replicate a Peloton cheaply.

2 January 2019 AHA 2019

I'll be at AHA talking digital history.

23 October 2018 Twitter Use at WHA2018

Analyzing Twitter during #WHA2018.

14 April 2018 Software I Use

Here's some software I really like right now.

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.

27 February 2018 Teaching the tidyverse to R novices

How I teach R to novices.

21 February 2018 Endangered Data Week

Announcing the founding of Endangered Data Week.

12 January 2018 Migrating to Hugo

Migrating my site to Hugo.

5 December 2017 HTTPS

Enforcing HTTPS around here.

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.

6 September 2017 Mapping Omaha Bikes

How can we make Omaha safer for bicyclists?

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.

19 June 2017 Recent Updates on Data Visualization

A few things I've made and read on data visualization.

6 June 2017 Mapping Midwest

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

23 May 2017 mozsprint

Participating in Mozilla's MozSprint!

24 April 2017 Introducing Endangered Data Week

How you can get involved with Endangered Data Week.

31 December 2016 Digital History at the AHA: Workshops, Roundtables, Sessions

Things I'm presenting on at the AHA next 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.

6 June 2015 Podcasts Redux

An update on some podcasts I'm currently listening to.

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.

31 December 2014 The View from New York

I'll be presenting at a couple of conference at the AHA.

30 December 2014 Teaching Digital History

During the fall quarter, I taught a digital history course at Stanford. Here's how it went.

30 October 2014 Research Design and Geography of the Post

How and why we designed Geography of the Post.

21 September 2014 Syllabus for Digital History

My syllabus for my digital history class I'm teaching at Stanford.

17 July 2014 Environmental History at the 2014 Western History Association Conference

Here's the panels about environmental history at the WHA this year.

12 July 2014 Simple Parsing CSV to JSON

A simple Ruby script for parsing a CSV into JSON.

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.

17 November 2013 Using Omekadd and Bash Together

Using Bash to automate adding content to Omeka.

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.

6 August 2013 Getting Started with D3

An overview for getting started with D3.

27 June 2013 Don't Forget Google Reader Goes Dark Monday

Google Reader goes dark on Monday.

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.

5 April 2013 History Harvest Blitz Week

Learn more about hosting a History Harvest.

17 March 2013 Interview for Digital History@Rice

My interview with Caleb McDaniel.

23 February 2013 The Link Blog Experiment

Maybe link blogging just isn't for me.

27 January 2013 Parsing CSV Data with Ruby

A simple script for parsing a CSV with Ruby and counting values.

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.

5 December 2012 Word Processor Mode in Vim

Vim is already great. Here's some adjustments to make it even better for writing.

3 December 2012 New Job, Joining Stanford

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

26 November 2012 OmniFocus Workflow and Notes

An overview on how I use Omnifocus.

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.

17 November 2012 Lorem Ipsum Block in Sublime Text

Sublime Text supports lorem ipsum by default.

14 November 2012 Searching My Brain

Using TextExpander to search my writing.

16 October 2012 Opening Marked in Vim

A simple way to open Marked via vim.

12 October 2012 Better Web Scraping with Nokogiri

An improved Ruby-based web scraper.

10 October 2012 Building Your Own Memex

How I manage information.

24 September 2012 Grad Students Guide to Good Coffee

How to make a great cup of coffee.

5 September 2012 Turning 28

It's my birthday!

1 September 2012 On Podcasts

Here's some of my favorite podcasts.

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.

7 June 2012 A Few New Scripts

A few scripts I'm using to automate some tasks.

6 June 2012 AHA Forming a Task Force on Digital Scholarship

A positive development: The AHA has formed a task force on digital scholarship.

6 June 2012 Popup Footnotes

A jQuery script for creating pop-up footnotes.

21 May 2012 Forking the Rubyist Historian

My open access book on Ruby programming for historians.

15 May 2012 It's About the Problem

Programming is about solving problems.

25 April 2012 Adam Lisagor's AeroPress Tribute

How Adam Lisagor makes his coffee.

24 April 2012 A Simple Ruby NGram Generator

A simple Ruby-based text tokenizer.

3 March 2012 Full Trash

There's just a few things in the trash.

15 February 2012 The French Press Method

A great method for prearing a French Press.

5 February 2012 Journals in the Digital Age

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

2 February 2012 The Paleo Diet

Adopting the paleo diet has been transformative.

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.

13 January 2012 A Call to Redefine Historical Scholarship in the Digital Age

We're asking for endorsements, feedback, and edits to our call for redefining historical scholarship.

5 January 2012 Digital History at the AHA

My inaugural attendance at the American Historical Association conference.

4 January 2012 THATCamp Proposal: Programming in the Humanities

My proposal for THATCamp AHA in Chicago.

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.

27 October 2011 Peer Reviewing Writing History in the Digital Age

My peer review of 'The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing' by Fred Gibbs and Trevor Owens.

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.

11 October 2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

A quick review of James Gleick's _The Information_.

6 October 2011 SpecLab and Digital Aesthetics

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

6 October 2011 Thanks, Steve

Remembering Steve Jobs.

5 October 2011 Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple, and Steve, played a huge role in my life.

28 September 2011 Spatial Humanities and Visual Narratives

A reading reflection on spatial history for HIST946.

26 September 2011 Digital Humanities at the 2012 American Historical Association

Digital history has a real showing at AHA 2012.

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.

29 August 2011 The Digital Humanities Seminar

An overview of my coursework 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.

14 July 2011 Own Your Identity

You need to control your identity on the web.

11 July 2011 On Writing and Notebooks

My current favorite notebook and pen.

9 July 2011 Twitter from the Command Line

I spend a lot of time at the CLI. Might as well tweet from it.

29 June 2011 Grown Up Computing

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

29 June 2011 Silicon Valley and the Cold War

Silicon Valley's military history in the Cold War.

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.

17 March 2011 Day of DH

My Day of DH 2011.

15 March 2011 Initial Thoughts on TileMill

A quick review of TileMill by Mapbox.

2 March 2011 Apple iPad 2

The iPad 2 looks excellent.

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.

13 February 2011 FREQr Version 2

Some improvements to my word tokenizer.

16 January 2011 Facebook and the Problem of Publics

There's a distinction to make between _a_ public and _the_ public.

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.

28 November 2010 FREQr, a Command Line Word Frequency Generator

A simple word tokenizer written in Ruby.

28 November 2010 Refocusing on Content

Reaching for the ease of the printed page.

24 November 2010 Pianobar, Your Command Line Pandora Client

Run Pandora from the command line.

8 October 2010 Open Access Scholarship and Computers in the Humanities

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

8 October 2010 Back to Blog (Basics)

Some redesigning of the site.

3 October 2010 Excuse the Mess

Doing a bit of design and cleanup. Excuse the dust.

10 August 2010 Preparing for Your Semester Teaching Assistantship

My semester checklist as I prepare for my teaching assistantship.

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.

20 April 2009 Foundational Material in Digital History

Here's how I would introduce someone to digital history.

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.

26 October 2008 The WHA: A Debrief

Looking back on the WHA conference.

18 September 2008 The Promise of Digital History

Digital history in the latest Journal of American History.

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.

12 April 2008 Liveblogging the Rawley: The Historical Community Online

Live-blogging the James Rawley History Conference.

8 April 2008 Bobley Visits UNL

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