Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms

This book talk examines how data archiving processes, the computational techniques of storage, exchange, and transmission, have transformed memory practices and created new regimes of asymmetric access. Drawing on fieldwork with historic computing machines, early digital data formats, personal digital assistants and early mobile apps, I trace how ‘archive’ became a verb in computing cultures, and how this shift enabled corporate platforms to assert functional sovereignty over collective memory.

While most critiques of big data focus on extraction and prediction, I argue that long-term storage and asymmetric access to data constitute a historically specific regime that determines what counts as memory in a time of platform capitalism. Through key scenes in the history of data management from the 1960s-2010s, I demonstrate how techniques of distancing separate data creators from the archives they create. These distancing techniques operate through embedded practices like automatic saving, cloud storage, and mobile apps that condition users to cede control while experiencing greater interaction with devices. By examining moments when institutions failed and corporations succeeded in controlling access to data archives, Archiving Machines offers both a critical genealogy of our current condition and grounds for imagining alternative futures for our digital cultural memory.

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).

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