Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies with Dr. Amelia Acker
March 3 @ 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms
Our world is filled with data we create but cannot access. We generate massive digital archives with every click, swipe, and search—but corporations, not individuals or institutions, control where this data lives and who can use it. When did archiving become something that machines do automatically, rather than a deliberate act of preservation for the public good? And how did we arrive at this arrangement with platforms?
Archiving Machines chronicles the hidden history of how data came to be structured and stored, before it could be streamed and automatically saved to the cloud. This lecture will examine how data archiving, the computational processes of storage, exchange, and transmission, have transformed memory practices and created new regimes of asymmetric access. Drawing on archival fieldwork with historic computing machines, I trace how “archive” became a verb in computing cultures, and how this shift has enabled corporate platforms to assert functional sovereignty over access to collective memory. By examining moments of access in the history of data management, this work offers both a critical genealogy of our current condition and grounds for imagining alternative futures for 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).
