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I’m Jeffery “Jake” Guin, a cultural heritage strategist, technologist, writer, and scholar-practitioner. Most of my work lives somewhere between technology, storytelling, memory, and the question of how people make the past useful in the present.

I started out as a journalist, and I still think like one. But at heart, I’m a folklorist. I’m interested in the stories people tell, the things communities choose to preserve, and the systems that shape what gets remembered.

Those questions are personal as well as professional. I am a member of the Natchitoches Tribe of Louisiana, and my family history also includes Louisiana Creole ancestry. That has made me increasingly attentive to what happens when cultural knowledge is interrupted, obscured, or lost — and to what it means to recover relationships with history, community, and inheritance responsibly. Questions of transmission, reclamation, belonging, and stewardship are therefore more than abstract subjects for me. They are part of how I understand the work.

Over the past three decades, I’ve worked across newspapers, museums, nonprofits, government, higher education, media, and the private sector — leading technology teams, building digital programs, and working on interpretation and preservation projects. My undergraduate work was in journalism and my master’s concentration was folklife and Southern culture. Along the way, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to help organizations make their technology serve their mission rather than the other way around.

Today I serve as Director of Technology & Digital Initiatives at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, where my work centers on digital strategy, institutional systems, staff capacity, and the infrastructure that increasingly sits underneath almost everything a cultural organization does. The thinking I express on this site does not represent the views of Vizcaya.

I started Voices of the Past in 2008 because I was fascinated by what the emerging social web might mean for cultural heritage. Blogs, podcasts, online video, and social platforms suddenly made it possible for people working with the past to speak directly to one another and to the public in new ways.

A lot has changed since then. The platforms certainly have. The underlying question hasn’t:

How can we use the tools of the present to become better stewards, interpreters, and advocates for what we inherit from the past?

I’m less interested in technology for its own sake than in what it allows people to do — and in what happens when institutions either empower or obstruct the people trying to do meaningful work inside them. That part matters to me more than it once did. I’ve become increasingly interested in the people at the front lines of cultural heritage: the curator trying to preserve something, the technologist trying to build something useful, the practitioner trying to persuade an institution to live up to its own mission.

Voices of the Past is where I think through those questions in public. It is part archive, part laboratory, and part ongoing conversation about cultural heritage practice and the technologies reshaping it.

I’m also a distance runner. That may seem like a separate subject, but increasingly I’m not sure it is. Running has its own relationship with memory, landscape, discipline, age, endurance, failure, and the strange human habit of choosing difficult things because we believe there’s something worth discovering on the other side.

So some of that lives here too.

After all these years, I’m still trying to understand how we carry things forward — and what deserves carrying.