As will be clear from this very short outline, heritage is highly political in nature, and this is no different in the digital realm, where the struggle for 'memory' and the past increasingly takes place. This plays out in both the global North and South, a division that has some explanatory value when assessing the availability of resources for digitisation and the effects of colonialism yet should not obscure significant internal variations. While (mass) heritage digitisation is most advanced in Western Europe, in terms of scale, even there not everything is, or will ever be, digitized. What is digitised, however, shapes the stories we can tell about the past. This is of course similar to the general question of what heritage is preserved and how that affects historical research and engagements with the past in general, yet ‘digital’ enhances and amplifies these impacts in various ways, which will be discussed in the second part of the paper.