Hi. I'm Jason.
I'm a writer, historian, hacker-scholar, and tech enthusiast. I grew up in South Dakota and currently live in San Jose, California, with my wife and our two dogs.
I serve as the Academic Technology Specialist in the Department of History at Stanford University, where I collaborate with faculty and graduate students on finding innovative ways to leverage technology in their teaching and research.
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln specializing in the North American West, 20th century United States, and digital history. My dissertation research focuses on an urban and environmental study of Silicon Valley.
Prior to joining Stanford, I served as the project manager for the William F. Cody Digital Archive at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities on the campus of UNL. I have contributed to several digital history projects, including The Digital History Project, Railroads and the Making of Modern America, The Buffalo Bill Project, Buffalo Bill's Wild West and the Progressive Image of American Indians, and Framing Red Power. More academic information can be found in my curriculum vitae.
As a bit of a work-related hobby and productive procrastination, I am interested in programming and the history of programming languages. In 2011 I wrote an ebook called The Rubyist Historian that intended to introduce humanities scholars to the basics of the Ruby programming language and its application to their everyday work. I am currently working on porting The Programming Historian over to Ruby. In addition to Ruby, I spend my days working with Bash, PHP, and Python, and have dabbled with Objective-C.
I write on a range of topics. Although I generally write on digital history and technology, my posts range from culture, music, coffee, ideas, and anything else that strikes me. There is no schedule or length that I seek to meet.
The site originally ran on WordPress but moved to Github and Jekyll for static blogging in early 2011. My posts are now version controlled with git. Most of my writing and coding happens in Sublime Text 2 or vim on my MacBook Pro. I use to be a heavy TextMate user, but remain unsure about it's future. The design of this site has changed frequently, mainly because I enjoy tinkering.
I am scattered around the Internet:
I also maintain a linkblog at Tumblr and contribute regularly to Gradhacker:
Feel free to email me. I can be reached at . You can also find me on Twitter.