We are a Colombian non-profit devoted to using new technologies to protect and promote the historical heritage of Latin America.

We design and build custom scanners to digitize historical collections, create tools and platforms to make them accessible, and develop digital history projects.

About Neogranadina

Fundación Histórica Neogranadina

Fundación Histórica Neogranadina

N.I.T. 900.861.407

About Neogranadina

Fundación Histórica Neogranadina is a non-profit foundation registered and constituted in the Republic of Colombia. Our principal objective is to use new tecnologies to protect, rescue, and promote Latin America’s historical manuscripts and early printed books.

What we do

We do three broad things:

  1. We design and build specialized scanning equipment and software for digitizing manuscript and printed works, and we use them to digitize the holdings of archives, libraries, community groups, and other state or private institutions and collectives in Latin America. We also help other institutions and groups plan, run, and oversee their own digitization initiatives.
  2. We develop and run digital tools and platforms for the management, publication, and access of digitized historical materials and their metadata. With these we work to preserve these materials and to make them accessible to researchers, students, teachers, and the general public around the world.
  3. We create digital humanities projects devoted to furthering historical research, teaching, and outreach, to bring historical knowledge to broad audiences in a variety of different formats.

Our team

Juan Fernando Cobo Betancourt

Juan is co-founder and legal representative of Neogranadina. He is a historian of colonial Latin America, a scholar and practitioner of digital humanities and digital public history. He holds a BA, MPhil, and PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and is assistant professor of History at the University of California. His work on colonial Latin America explores questions of religion, colonialism, law, and language, focusing on the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia); his work in digital humanities in the preservation of historical materials through digitisation; and his work in public history on developing public-facing initiatives to bring historical materials to new audiences. Personal website.

Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez

Santiago is co-founder of Neogranadina. He is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds an undergraduate and masters degree in History from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and a PhD in History from Yale University. He is interested in learning about the interaction between European empires and indigenous groups in Latin America, and his research seeks to understand the dynamics of power between the indigenous population of northern South America and the early Spanish Empire. He is also fascinated by the history of maps and efforts to produce knowledge about nature in the New World. Personal website.

Natalie Cobo

Natalie is co-founder of Neogranadina. She is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, working on the 1565 Spanish invasion of the Philippines and the early colonial period. She has a BA and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge. She is also an external researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany, where is is translating Juan de Solórzano y Pereira’s De Gubernatione from Latin into English and Spanish, as part of the Translating Solórzano project. Personal website.

Andreína Soto Segura

Andreína is a specialist in project planning and grant management and serves as a liaison for several of our inter-institutional projects. Andreína has a master’s degree in history from Villanova University, and a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research analyzes the history of the African diaspora in Venezuela and the Caribbean during the early modern period. She is also the Senior Associate Director of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective. Personal website.

María del Pilar Ramírez Restrepo

Pilar is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a master’s and an undergraduate degree in History from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Medellín, and an undergraduate degree in Hispanic Philology from the Universidad de Antioquia. She studies the political history of Jesuit missions in the early modern period from the perspective of language policy and linguistic knowledge in the Orinoco region, in northeastern South America. At Neogranadina, she works on the planning and development of digitization projects, and on collaborative efforts of public history. Personal website.

Jairo Antonio Melo

Jairo is Neogranadina’s tech lead. He is in charge of developing and maintaining our digital platforms, tools, and software. He holds BA and MA degrees in History from the Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga, Colombia) and a PhD in History from the Centro de Estudios Históricos de El Colegio de Michoacán (México). As a historian he researches 18th- and 19th-century legal and political institutions, with a special interest in the transformation of the Spanish monarchy and the transition towards national states. As a digital humanist, he explores the theory and practice of digital history, particularly the transformation of documents in the digital realm and the digital infrastructure required for digital humanities praxis. At the same time, he has specialized in the development of applications, the management of data and archives through their entire life cylces, the implementation and adaptation of digital publishing platforms, minimal computing, and other areas. Personal website.

Camilla Falanesca

Camilla Falanesca is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCSB. She studies the modern Middle East, with a focus on North Africa. Her research centers on the intersection between political economy and memory studies. She holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Leiden University, and a BA in Languages, Culture and Society of Asia and Mediterranean Africa from Ca’Foscari University of Venice.


Neogranadina in academic publications

  • Gayol, Víctor and Jairo Antonio Melo Flórez. “Presente y perspectivas de las humanidades digitales en América Latina”. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 42, no. 2 (2017): 281-284. [Link]
  • Muñoz Arbeláez, Santiago and Juan Cobo Betancourt. “Neogranadina: un archivo digital en la era de las humanidades digitales”, in Simposio internacional de patrimonio documental y memoria, ed. Ana María Henao Albarracín (Cali, Colombia: Fundación BiblioTEC, 2020). [Link]
  • Pérez Benavides, Amada Carolina, and Sebastián Vargas Álvarez. “Historia Pública e investigación colaborativa: perspectivas y experiencias para la coyuntura actual colombiana”. Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 46, no. 1 (2019): 297–329. [Link]
  • ———. “Perspectives on Public History in Colombia”. International Public History 4, no. 2 (1 December 2021): 143–52. [Link]
  • Afanador-Llach, Maria José, and Andrés Lombana-Bermudez. “Developing New Literacy Skills and Digital Scholarship Infrastructures in the Global South: A Case Study”, in Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Paola Ricaurte (U of Minnesota Press, 2022). [Link]
  • Crymble, Adam and María José Afanador-Llach. “Digital History: the global unequal promise of digital tools”, in Teaching history for the contemporary world: tensions, challenges and classroom experiences in higher education, ed. Adele Nye and Jennifer Clark (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2021), 90. [Link]

Partners and funders

We have worked with, or received support from, the following institutions: