New Books in History Amelia Acker, "Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms" (MIT Press, 2025)
Mar 4, 2026
Amelia Acker, associate professor at Rutgers who studies how data are preserved and represented. She traces computing’s archival history from punch cards and magnetic tape to PDAs and cloud platforms. The conversation covers privacy law, telephone metadata, the rise of managed data silos, and challenges of preserving software and platform‑based records.
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Students Saying 'I Am An Archiver' Sparked The Project
- Amelia Acker recounts noticing her students started using "archiving" as a verb around 2011, prompting her to trace when archivists adopted the term.
- That classroom observation launched her inquiry into the multiple meanings of archiving across computing history.
Magnetic Tape Shifted The Politics Of Archiving
- Magnetic tape made data mobile and much easier to copy, which transformed archival debates about centralizing governmental records.
- Amelia Acker uses the National Data Center hearings (1966–67) to show how tape's portability fueled privacy concerns and policy like the 1974 Privacy Act.
Files Are An Evolving Abstraction Not A Fixed Object
- The concept of a file is an evolving abstraction that bundles data and enables nested structures like directories.
- Acker argues the file's grammar changed from punch cards to cloud apps, and modern apps 'disappear' files behind automated interfaces.
