About

Who

Hello. My name is Richard Ross and I am doc­toral stu­dent in Envi­ron­men­tal His­tory at Clare­mont Grad­u­ate Uni­ver­sity and occa­sional dig­i­tal his­to­rian. You can find me in the dig­i­tal mul­ti­verse: Twit­ter, Flickr, and Pin­board.

Why

My back­coun­try ski­ing, climb­ing, hik­ing, bik­ing and all-​around good friend, Hiller, and I are advo­cates of “Light is Right.” Now we live 1000+ miles apart and no longer get the chance to spend time in the back­coun­try. How­ever, when we trav­eled in the back­coun­try as lightly as pos­si­ble, climb­ing gear was any­thing but light, so we often left it home, but still wanted to tackle a peak, like Crazy Peak in the Crazy Moun­tains. Being “hard­men”, we could not just take the stan­dard hik­ing route, we needed to find a chal­leng­ing route that did not require gear: moun­tains goats knew just where to go and just where to step so we would watch for and use the routes they took when and where applic­a­ble. Goa­tRock was the name we bestowed on those paths. As for the Research, it ref­er­ences my past and present both in the back­coun­try and the archive that doing envi­ron­men­tal his­tory requires.

What

Below you will find a short list of the projects I am cur­rently work­ing on, if you have ques­tions or com­ments about these projects please con­tact me.

Nat­ural History(ies) of the Puente Hills

Dis­ser­ta­tion Research. I hope to explore the rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between the nat­ural and human in the Puente Hills region in the Greater Los Ange­les basin. I am par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in how our cur­rent and past expe­ri­ences of Nature in the Puente Hills is reflected in cur­rent efforts to pre­serve the Puente Hills within a heav­ily urban­ized region.

This research is based on a “nat­ural non – human his­tory” project I com­pleted for the Puente Hills Land­fill Native Habi­tat Author­ity.

Human­i­ties 340

The CGU School of Arts and Human­i­ties dig­i­tal human­i­ties course/​research tool is designed to give stu­dents con­cep­tual and prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence in apply­ing infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies to research projects in the humanities.

My cur­rent research with respect to the dig­i­tal human­i­ties revolves around four issues: design as an inte­gral part of dig­i­tal human­i­ties web-​based projects; what, how, and why we teach what we teach in a dig­i­tal human­i­ties course, par­tic­u­larly con­cern­ing older stu­dents; the pos­si­bil­i­ties for col­lab­o­ra­tion via social media; and finally, using a vari­ety of dig­i­tal tools and meth­ods as a part of my dis­ser­ta­tion research and its publication.

Ulti­mately, my inter­est in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties cen­ters on its abil­ity to push human­ist schol­ars in new direc­tions by help­ing them answer old ques­tions in new ways as well as ask new ques­tions with greater depth.

Pacific Coast Branch of the Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Association

Sta­tic site pro­vides access to infor­ma­tion about the organization’s annual prizes and con­fer­ence. Cur­rently work­ing on a Word­Press based ver­sion, slated for release in Sum­mer 2012.

Oral His­tory Cat­a­logue @ Clare­mont Grad­u­ate University

This anno­tated cat­a­logue encom­passes all inter­views cur­rently deposited in the CGU Oral His­tory Collection.