Episode 45: Jason Heppler Wants Tools That Fit His Questions

Drafting the Past

Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a show about the craft of writing history. In this episode, host Kate Carpenter interviewed historian and web developer Dr. Jason Heppler.

Kate has been following Jason’s work and career path for some time now and was so excited to talk with him about his new book, Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism, which came out earlier this year. Jason is a developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He has worked on a whole bunch of cool digital projects, which you can explore more on his website, as well as the co-editor of the book Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy. We talked about the evolution of his work alongside his career, the digital tools he uses in his own projects, the relationship between coding and writing, and much more.