Imagine a punch card you can hold in your hand. A reel of magnetic tape spinning in a basement. A Palm Pilot collecting dust in a drawer. Your smartphone pinging a cell tower every few seconds. These data storage formats are evidence of how archiving became something machines do for us, rather than something we do for ourselves. This interactive book talk uses early mobile computing artifacts to tell the hidden history of how we lost control of our data. Each object marks a shift in who structures, stores, and can access the digital archives we generate with every click, swipe, and search.
Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms examines how ‘archive’ became a verb in computing cultures, and how this shift enabled a political one. Today, corporations, not individuals or institutions, largely control access to our data archives. By tracing moments of technological transition through material objects, this work offers both a critical genealogy of asymmetric access and grounds for imagining alternative futures for digital cultural memory.
Speaker Biography:
Amelia Acker is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research on data management and digital preservation has been supported with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the ACM History and Archiving Fellowship. Acker’s projects address the representation and loss of digital traces, the history of data management, and the transmission of information through time. She investigates how infrastructure and organizational practices shape the preservation, accessibility, and governance of data, with a particular focus on the impact of platforms, software, and AI on archives and digital memory. Acker is the author of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms (MIT, 2025).
