Few historians would deny that archives or libraries are repositories of carefully selected and curated collections and thus far from neutral: “No archive is innocent”, as Elizabeth Yale wrote (Yale 2015: 332). By the same token, the digitisation of historical sources, is far from neutral. In a research environment that increasingly privileges what is available online, where traditional archives are sometimes even referred to as ‘hidden’, and ‘old-fashioned’ browsing is replaced by surgical discovery, we would do well to start imagining what a world of historical scholarship based upon digital resources looks like. Just as the differences between ‘analogue’ sources and their digital, yet equally material, representations are easily overlooked, so too changing modes of access to digital sources are rarely scrutinised for their consequences for historical research. In sum, there is a marked discrepancy between the use of digital resources by many historians and their lack of interest in, or understanding of, how these are created and constituted.