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

I'm Jason Heppler, a developer, historian, and educator 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.

In my work, I've collaborated with several different groups of researchers and practitioners including the Spatial History Project, Humanities+Design, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, the Mozilla Foundation, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, the American Historical Association, the Western History Association, and others at George Mason University, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Stanford University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Among my work with data, I was the co-founder of Endangered Data Week intended to promote care for endangered collections, open government, community data privacy, and data ethics.

I volunteer my time with the Environmental History Action Collaborative and History Rebellion.

In my own research, I'm an environmental historian of the North American West and Great Plains with an interest in landscape change and the ways that people enact (and react) to such changes. 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. 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.

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

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