Archiving Machines

Amelia Acker's Archiving Machines traces the technical and cultural history of how machines have archived data, from punch cards and magnetic tape to cloud platforms.

The book situates archival processes—storage, exchange, and transmission—within shifting practices and policies that shaped data sovereignty, privacy, and access.

Each chapter analyzes archival technologies (timesharing, data banks, file systems, PDAs, and mobile networks) to show how expectations about files, metadata, and control evolved.

Acker emphasizes tensions between automation (distancing) and user interactivity (closer grammars of action), and considers contemporary implications for platform control, surveillance, and AI agents.

The work combines archival theory and computing history to inform preservation and policy debates about born-network records and future archiving.