The CESTA Fellows gather weekly on Wednesday afternoons to explore new directions in digital humanities scholarship with invited guests from an array of departments and research programs across campus. Jason Heppler, who recently earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln focusing on digital and public history, joined us for a lively conversation on the benefits of using digital tools for academic research, publishing, and teaching, as well as involving local communities and making history accessible to the general public. Jason is part of a diverse group of Academic Technology Specialists (ATS), which is one of the niches at Stanford for academics with expertise in the digital humanities. The technology specialists collaborate with faculty and students in their respective home department or research center, while also contributing to the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) to support innovations in scholarship across campus.
Jason trained at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln working closely with William G. Thomas III, The John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History, and Douglas Seefeldt, Assistant Professor of History and Faculty Fellow with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Throughout he also learned to teach himself (as many digital humanists do) in order to hone the requisite skills, adapt humanities methods for digital platforms, and critically engage with the history of technology.
Jason initiated his work in the field as a digital research editor and later a project manager for the digitization of The William F. Cody Archive at UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and produced several scholarly works from the experience. The project of digitizing the Cody or “Buffalo Bill” Archive was a joint partnership with the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center for the West to provide a platform for researchers and visitors to explore the legendary showman’s role in colonial settlement and expansion in the American West from the late 19th to the early 20th century. One of Jason’s key contributions to this project was to build a database from a corpus of employment contracts signed by over 500 Native Americans or “Show Indians” who agreed, if paid well, to perform and travel with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show throughout the United States and Europe. Jason drew from this experience, in part, to develop his Master’s thesis, Framing Red Power: The American Indian Movement and the Politics of Media. He has made both the database and his thesis accessible online, via UNL’s digital repository, upholding his commitment to public history and he receives frequent inquiries from children and grandchildren of the Wild West generation who are looking for personal ties to these documents.
Digital publishing is one of the central themes for the 2015-2016 CESTA Graduate Research Fellows Program. As George Philip LeBourdais mentioned in his last post to this blog, Nicholas Bauch’s born-digital monograph Enchanting the Desert will be the first digital humanities publication to be released by Stanford University Press. Bauch and many others who have visited with the CESTA Fellows this year have addressed both the great potential and myriad challenges of publishing a digital humanities project including the questions of access, hosting and preservation, multiple authorship, readership and navigation, peer review, and moreover the career value of digital scholarship for those negotiating tenure-track jobs in academia. Jason is in accord with several others who view a digital humanities project as a companion to the more conventional single-authored and printed monograph. In other words, at this early moment in creating infrastructure for digital publishing, a web-based project is best approached as a companion to a book. The development and management of a server dedicated to digital publishing and the “solidity of the object” for perpetuity will require a whole new team of people. There are also key unresolved concerns about the notion of copyright versus open access. For a public historian like Jason, while the future of the digital humanities is uncertain, the inclusivity of the field has been a cornerstone of its success.
While Jason and his academic advisors are strong advocates of innovation in digital humanities scholarship, he ultimately wrote his dissertation in a conventional way. Machines in the Valley: Growth, Conflict, and Environmental Politics in Silicon Valley is a printed manuscript on urban development and the rise of environmental politics in the San Francisco Bay Area after the Second World War from 1945-1990. In his defense of the dissertation, there was only sparse mention of the digital humanities work involved. That said, Jason has filed a PDF copy with UNL as well as other online repositories, and he still sees potential for developing the digital components and future iterations of this work aimed towards accessibility and community involvement.
Jason’s generosity and enthusiasm for digital and public history came through in his conversation with the CESTA Fellows. In addition to insights on academic research and publishing, he shared many resources for teaching and organizational productivity. With attention to both work and relaxation, he seems to have mastered the art of time management. You can hear more from Jason on iTunes where he co-produces two podcasts, The First Draft (with Elijah Meeks and Paul Zenke) and Overanalyze (with Robert Jordan and Andy Wilson).