Jason A. Heppler is a fourth-generation Westerner born and raised in South Dakota. He currently serves as the Academic Technology Specialist in the Department of History, where he collaborates on research and teaching projects integrating digital history techniques to the study of the past. A historian of the United States, his research and teaching focuses on the North American West, environmental history, urban history, social and cultural history, and digital history. He holds an M.A. in History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the UNL. He is currently completing his dissertation, which looks at the environmental history of Silicon Valley and the emergence of environmental politics in the West. He is the author of The Rubyist Historian, an electronic book on Ruby programming for humanities scholars, and contributor to The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture. His digital scholarship include Framing Red Power: The American Indian Movement and the Politics of Media, "Self Sustaining and a Good Citizen": William F. Cody and the Progressive Wild West, and the William F. Cody Archive.