New Books Network Amelia Acker, "Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms" (MIT Press, 2025)
Mar 4, 2026
Amelia Acker, associate professor and information scientist who studies archival perspectives, walks through computing history from punch cards to cloud platforms. She explores data banks, timesharing, PDAs as early app ecosystems, privatized population-scale collection, and how archives shape access today. The conversation lifts key moments that connect past storage practices to current platform power.
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Students Using 'Archiving' Sparked The Project
- Amelia Acker was prompted to study archiving when students began using 'archiving' as a verb for community projects and activism.
- This everyday usage led her to trace when archivists adopted the term and how meanings shifted with computing.
National Data Center Revealed Early Data Aggregation Fears
- The failed National Data Center revealed early tensions between centralized public data aggregation and American distrust of government surveillance.
- Transition from punch cards to magnetic tape made data easier to copy and aggregate, fueling congressional pushback and privacy legislation in the late 1960s.
Files Are An Abstraction That Is Disappearing
- The notion of a file is an enduring abstraction used to bundle data, but its practical meaning shifted across technologies and grammars of action.
- Modern apps and cloud services 'disappear' files from users, changing preservation practices and users' sense of control.
