Just a small note: I'm not sure of the answer one way or the other (I am moderately "in the know" on recent work in computational history of science, but not the broader field of history), but two years is not very long in the world of historical study. I work on individual research projects for longer than that. (Fortunately I have several in the "queue" at once, so there is a moderate stream of them.) Launching a new research project, much less one that used different historical methodologies or tools, will take longer than that. "Check back in a decade," seems like a dispiriting thing to say, but it's probably too soon to know. Neither scholars, nor the historical profession, can remake itself overnight, esp. if it requires new education or tools, even if it wanted to. And I'm not at all sure the profession does want to do this; there are methodological issues with the "Big History" approach, and most of the historians I know have not been inspired to pursue it, for the same reasons Blakemore is dubious that it will work: "it is not entirely clear what they want historians to actually do." It is hard to imagine a junior scholar taking up this task (it would be some form of folly and hubris), and it is hard to imagine a senior scholar being able to re-tool in such a dramatic way (perhaps I underestimate senior scholars, but very few seem that interested in re-learning their trade, for good reason).

There are some people that I know who have been using topic modeling in the study of history and getting some interesting results (the Digital Innovation group at ASU, who have been doing a lot of very sophisticated computational history work, in part by adopting algorithms and ideas from the field of evolutionary biology, which is a much more technically sophisticated approach than Paper Machines enables out of the box), but they were doing it prior to 2014, and are not doing it for the same reasons that Armitage and Guldi argued for (they are not doing "Big History" in the sense they mean; their time frames and topics are still relatively delimited, e.g., "how do fields of science reconfigure themselves around influential ideas?", which is interesting but not "Big History"). It is probably not a good sign that Paper Machines' Facebook page has not been updated since 2013.