New Books in Science, Technology, and Society Amelia Acker, "Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms" (MIT Press, 2025)
Mar 4, 2026
Amelia Acker, Associate Professor at Rutgers and author of Archiving Machines, traces data archiving from punch cards and magnetic tape to cloud platforms. She talks about the politics of data aggregation, the shift from federal to private control, the evolution of files and PDAs into app ecosystems, and how agents and AI reshape archival practices.
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Archiving Became A Verb Through User Practice
- Archivists adopted "archiving" as a verb as users began self-describing grassroots preservation efforts.
- Amelia Acker noticed students saying “I'm archiving the music scene” and traced when practitioners borrowed the term from computing history.
Tape Migration Triggered Data Sovereignty Debates
- Magnetic tape migration revealed political tensions over centralized population-level data.
- The failed 1960s National Data Center debate led to privacy laws and indirectly enabled private sector data aggregation.
Files Disappeared As Apps Automated Bundles
- The file is an abstraction that changed across eras from punch cards to app-driven systems.
- Amelia Acker argues apps have "disappeared" files, hiding bundles and altering how archivists preserve born-digital records.
