Data, Archives and Information in Society (DAIS) Seminar: Amelia Acker, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Book Description: 

This book talk examines how data archiving processes, the computational techniques of storage, exchange, and transmission, have transformed memory practices and created new regimes of asymmetric access. Drawing on fieldwork with historic computing machines, early digital data formats, personal digital assistants and early mobile apps, I trace how ‘archive’ became a verb in computing cultures, and how this shift enabled corporate platforms to assert functional sovereignty over collective memory.

While most critiques of big data focus on extraction and prediction, I argue that long-term storage and asymmetric access to data constitute a historically specific regime that determines what counts as memory in a time of platform capitalism. Through key scenes in the history of data management from the 1960s-2010s, I demonstrate how techniques of distancing separate data creators from the archives they create. These distancing techniques operate through embedded practices like automatic saving, cloud storage, and mobile apps that condition users to cede control while experiencing greater device interaction. By examining moments when institutions failed and corporations succeeded in controlling access to data archives, Archiving Machines offers both a critical genealogy of our current condition and grounds for imagining alternative futures for our digital cultural memory.

Open Access Book Link: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/6055/Archiving-MachinesFrom-Punch-Cards-to-Platforms 

RSVP (link) for in-person attendance is requested. 

Register (link) here for online attendance.