We develop tools and projects in public and digital history.
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 technologies to protect, rescue, and promote Latin America's historical manuscripts and early printed books.
Our work spans three areas.
Digitization
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.
Digital tools
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.
Digital history
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.
The team behind Neogranadina.
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 associate professor of History at the University of California. Personal website.
Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez
Santiago is co-founder of Neogranadina. He is associate 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 has a BA and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge and DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, and is an affiliate researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany. She is interested in the histories of early modern Iberian world, with a special focus on the 16th-century Philippines, and in questions of legal history, colonialism, and the transmission of political ideas in early modern Latin texts. 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 is 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 a historian. 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 cycles, the implementation and adaptation of digital publishing platforms, minimal computing, and other areas. Personal website.
Catalina Salguero
Catalina Salguero holds a degree in Art History and a Master’s in Arts with an Emphasis on Cultural Project Management, both obtained from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research focuses on religious art, particularly examining the role of evangelization programs among Afro-descendant populations in New Granada. As a digital humanist, her interests include using Linked Open Data, information visualization, and knowledge organization. Additionally, she has experience in interface development and design, specializing in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design.
Adelaida Ávila
Adelaida is a visual designer and historian specializing in digital products, UX/UI, web design and development, and digital communication strategies. Her main focus is on translating complex information into engaging and user-friendly digital experiences, a skill that has earned her two awards. She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Communication Design from Aalto University (Finland), a BA Hons in Design focused on Human-Centered Design with a Communication minor, and a BA in History, both from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Personal website.
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:
