Global South

“Global South” is a political and historical term more than a geographical one. It names the regions — much of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania — whose histories were shaped by colonialism, and which still have less access to wealth, infrastructure and institutional power than the Global North. In digital humanities it is also a lens: on whose archives are digitised, in which languages, on whose terms, and for whom.

Why it matters for your research. The digital record of the past is thinnest where the Global South is concerned. Large databases of nineteenth-century print sit behind paywalls and lean heavily towards English; vernacular periodicals are often digitised only as page images that no search can see into; and the tools that read text were built first for English and for Latin script. Researchers in the Global South meet these gaps twice — in what they cannot find, and in the subscriptions and equipment they are assumed to have. An absence in the digital archive is not an absence in the past, but it can easily become one in the scholarship written from it.

In Archēglyph. The project starts from South Asia. It reads South Asian, Arabic-script and other non-Latin scripts; it translates into the language a researcher works in, not only into English; and it runs in a web browser, from a photograph of a page, free during the pre-release period. Mapping which collections of the Global South have been digitised, and on whose terms, is part of the research agenda.

Not to be confused with. “Developing countries”, which frames the same regions in economic terms alone. Nor with a single map: the archives about the Global South are often held in the Global North — in the colonial records of European libraries — and the communities the term describes live on both sides of that line.

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