A life examined through the things I made, the questions I followed, the roads I left, and the ones that somehow led me back.
The work on this site stretches back farther than the site itself. Voices of the Past began in 2008, but many of the ideas behind it were already visible much earlier: an interest in people who carry knowledge, places that hold memory, technologies that change how stories move, and the systems that determine what gets preserved, shared, understood, or forgotten. I did not always have language for those interests when I first encountered them. Sometimes I thought I was doing journalism, sometimes communications, sometimes technology, sometimes teaching, and sometimes I was simply following a question because it seemed important. Looking back, the boundaries are much less clear. The pieces below are not arranged by publication date. They follow the chronology of the life and work they describe, using old posts and new reflections as markers along the way.
For the shorter professional version, read my bio.
Formation
20 Years Later, I Finally Understand What College Media Leadership Taught Me
Long before Voices of the Past, museums, or digital heritage entered the picture, college media gave me an early laboratory for leadership, experimentation, criticism, conflict, and change. I learned what it meant to inherit something with a history, question how it worked, make changes that not everyone welcomed, and leave it different from how I found it. I did not understand all of that at the time, but years later I could see how much of my professional behavior was already taking shape there: testing ideas, arguing over purpose, learning from resistance, and thinking about whether an institution should simply preserve a tradition or keep evolving it.
Read: 20 Years Later, I Finally Understand What College Media Leadership Taught Me
Recognition
Before I Knew to Call It Heritage
Long before I worked in museums, studied folklore, or described myself as a cultural heritage professional, I had a corporate communications job that kept pulling me toward things that did not feel particularly corporate. I followed people into forests, documented places, became interested in the people carrying knowledge rather than simply the institutions presenting it, and helped create interpretation for a place whose original purpose had largely disappeared. At the time, I thought I worked in communications. Looking back, I can see many of the instincts that would later shape my work already there: curiosity about place, attention to lived knowledge, interest in interpretation, and a tendency to connect technology, storytelling, and public meaning before I had a vocabulary for any of it.
Read: Before I Knew to Call It Heritage: My First Corporate Communications Job
Emergence
Digital Heritage 2006–2016: Ten Years of Change
By the mid-2000s, something fundamental was changing in media, communications, and public knowledge. Publishing was becoming participatory, audiences were becoming contributors, and tools that had once belonged to institutions were moving into the hands of individuals. That shift mattered to me because it seemed larger than a new collection of websites or gadgets. It raised questions about who could speak, who could publish, how institutions related to their publics, and what would happen when knowledge no longer moved primarily through controlled channels. Looking back ten years later, I could see that the lasting changes were not only technical: they involved openness, participation, storytelling, preservation, platform dependence, algorithmic control, and the growing need to ask what digital practice was actually for.
Read: Digital Heritage 2006–2016: Ten Years of Change
Experimentation
PR + Web 2.0 + Teaching Equals One Real Mashup
By 2008, I was trying to teach a field while the field itself was still changing underneath us. Journalism, public relations, social media, digital publishing, audience participation, and emerging web tools were beginning to collide, while professional and academic structures were still trying to decide where the boundaries belonged. That uncertainty did not seem like a reason to wait. It seemed like a reason to experiment. Teaching became another form of inquiry: a place to test what these tools actually meant, how practice was changing, and whether students could learn to think across categories that institutions still treated as separate.
Read: PR + Web 2.0 + Teaching Equals One Real Mashup
Connection
On a Personal Note … Thank You
When I started Voices of the Past, the social web still felt genuinely new, and publishing something could unexpectedly lead to a conversation with someone across the country or across the world. A blog post, podcast, video, comment, or shared link could create relationships that would never have existed otherwise, and that possibility was part of what made the early web feel so alive. This post captures something I was beginning to understand even then: the technology was exciting, but the real value was not the platform itself. It was the connection the platform made possible, the sense that people with overlapping interests could find one another, exchange ideas, and build something larger than any single post or project.
Read: On a Personal Note … Thank You
Advocacy
Finding Your Online Voice to Advocate for Heritage Resources
By 2010, I thought I was writing about how heritage professionals could participate more effectively online. Reading it now, I can see that I was also documenting a change in myself. I had moved from commenting on other people’s work to publishing, teaching, podcasting, producing video, and taking a public position on questions of expertise, participation, and who gets heard. The piece matters in this chronology because it catches that transition while it was still happening: I was finding a professional voice at the same time I was arguing that cultural institutions needed to make more room for other voices too.
Read: Finding Your Online Voice to Advocate for Heritage Resources
Purpose
What I’m About, Through My Daughter’s Eyes
In 2011, while writing a newspaper column about visiting a cemetery in Natchitoches with my daughter, I was trying to explain why stories and memory mattered. She answered more clearly than I could: “share stories so we remember about people.” Looking back, I can see a simple statement of purpose underneath much of the work that followed. The vocabulary became more elaborate—public knowledge, institutional memory, knowledge systems—but the reason for building any of those systems remained human.
Read: What I’m about, through my daughter’s eyes
Voice
You Don’t Have to Be a King to Find Your Voice
By 2011, Voices had become more than an experiment in new media because the act of writing, interviewing, teaching, publishing, and participating publicly in a field had changed how I understood my own place in it. I had found a professional voice I had not fully understood I possessed, and with that came a growing interest in what happens when other people are given the tools, confidence, and opportunity to speak for themselves as well. The title makes me smile a little now, but the idea beneath it still feels central: voice is not about status or authority handed down from somewhere else. It is about developing something worth saying, learning how to say it, and creating the conditions in which other people can do the same. Around that same period, getting Voices added to Alltop’s Social Media page felt like a small but meaningful sign that the project had begun to earn legitimacy beyond my own corner of the web.
Read: You Don’t Have to Be a King to Find Your Voice
Also from this moment: Alltop.com Adds Voices of the Past to Its Social Media Page. Sweet!
Rupture
Dark Times and Leaps of Faith
Careers rarely develop in the tidy arcs we construct afterward, and mine certainly did not. There were periods of momentum, reinvention, exhaustion, uncertainty, and distance from work that had once felt central to who I was, and Voices itself eventually became part of that story. The site remained online, but my relationship with it changed, and what had once represented energy, possibility, and connection gradually became something much harder to face. That interruption matters because without it the story becomes too easy, too smooth, and too much like a retrospective in which every decision inevitably led to the next. It did not. There were breaks, doubts, wrong turns, and periods when moving forward required a leap before I could see where it would land.
Read: Dark Times and Leaps of Faith
Agency
A Tech Guy Adopts E-Ink Thinking and Decimates His Home Electronics … Here’s What Manifested
For years I had been interested in what technology could make possible, but eventually I became equally interested in what it was doing to us. This experiment with e-ink, devices, and digital minimalism became part of a larger reconsideration of attention, habits, agency, and the ways technology quietly shapes behavior long after the novelty wears off. The question shifted from what a tool could do to what kind of behavior it encouraged, what it displaced, and whether that was actually what I wanted. That change in perspective now shapes much of how I think about technology inside institutions as well, because tools are never really just tools once they enter systems of human behavior, incentives, routines, expectations, and culture.
Read: A Tech Guy Adopts E-Ink Thinking and Decimates His Home Electronics … Here’s What Manifested
Return
Coming Back to Voices
For years, Voices of the Past sat online in an uncomfortable state between archive and unfinished business. Deleting it would have felt like giving up something important, but maintaining it felt increasingly difficult, and confronting it meant confronting more than broken links, abandoned platforms, missing videos, and old WordPress decisions. The site preserved evidence of a period when I felt unusually curious, productive, connected, and willing to experiment in public, but it also preserved evidence of unrealized potential and of work I had walked away from before I fully understood what it meant. Coming back has therefore felt less like restoring an old website and more like reopening a conversation with an earlier version of myself, one whose ideas were sometimes naive, sometimes wrong, sometimes ahead of their moment, and often more continuous with my current thinking than I expected.
Post to come: the return to Voices of the Past, the albatross, unrealized potential, and what it means to reclaim the work without trying to recreate the past.
The Story Continues
The archive is increasingly becoming part of the work itself, which means revisiting old projects, interviews, experiments, presentations, recordings, websites, and ideas to ask what became real, what disappeared, what I misunderstood, and what remains useful now. Sometimes the answer will become a new essay, a case study, a recovered recording, or a project retrospective, and sometimes the most useful conclusion will simply be that an idea belonged to its moment. The point is not nostalgia and it is not proof that I was once active. The point is to use the past as evidence for the trajectory, to understand what I have been working toward all along, and to decide what is still worth carrying forward.