Digital History: The Globally Unequal Promise of Digital Tools for History: UK and Colombia’s Case Study

This chapter examines the opportunities presented by new ‘digital’ history tools. It argues that data wrangling and data crunching allow historians to ask new questions that we have never been able to ask before, because we can now make sense of data that was previously inaccessible. The promise of big data and new digital tools has been one of the key conversations of the past decade. However, it is not a globally equal promise. It has come on the back of nearly two decades of mass digitization that privileged the historical sources of the West, and of Anglophone countries in particular. Those data were created predominantly through the cultural perspectives and technical infrastructures of those same privileged nations. The original records themselves were produced as the result of an advanced bureaucracy designed to administer a global empire. Thus, many of these new techniques are inaccessible to scholars studying or living in countries that today some people call the ‘Global South’. Not only are the data not digitized, but sometimes the sources simply do not exist because of the historic nature of the archive: what was recorded, and what has survived. These deep digital divides are made worse by a lack of technical infrastructures in many countries. Even in the wealthy countries of the West, social barriers and the expectations of humanities students to be able to avoid mathematics and computers raise difficulties for educators attempting to help students make the most of the digital age. This chapter, therefore, takes a West/South look at the promises of the ‘digital’ age for history, through the different challenges faced in the UK and Colombia, respectively, to show not only what the future might hold, but also where we still need to focus our energy in pursuit of a more equitable learning environment of the future.