Review article of: A. Acker (2025). Archiving Machines. Technology and the Future of Memory Institutions, MIT Press, Cambridge (Ms)-London, 248 pp. To download as open source: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/6055/Archiving-MachinesFrom-Punch-Cards-to-Platforms.
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Dr G.J. van Bussel
The author
Amelia Acker is an associate professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Her scholarship focuses on the generation, standardization, and preservation of digital information. Her research centres on three pillars: data technologies (the tools used to generate and capture information), digital archives (the management of digital data), and information infrastructures (the systems that facilitate long-term preservation and serve as repositories for cultural memory). Prior to her appointment at Rutgers, she served as Director of the Critical Data Studies Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. She led interdisciplinary research initiatives concerning the societal impact of ubiquitous mobile technology, public and academic understanding of data systems, and frameworks that enable information to remain searchable and functional over time. 1
The key thesis
Archiving Machines. From Punch Cards to Platforms offers an historical overview of storage technologies and processes, tracing their evolution from the data banks of the 1960s to the emergence of contemporary digital platforms. At the heart of Acker’s argument is the assertion that storage systems function as ‘archiving machines’ that actively shape memory, regulate access, and distribute power. Grounded in Science and Technology Studies and Infrastructure Theory, but also using insights from Media Studies, she contends that these machines define the boundaries of cultural memory, determine its control, and define its organization.
As she clarifies, these machines are ‘not about traditional archives found in institutions but rather about how accessing knowledge has transformed as computational processes for storing and managing data developed, thus putting pressure on concepts of archives, archive, and archiving. In other words, this book explores how ‘archive’ became a verb with the rise of data-driven recordkeeping to unpack the stakes of archiving machines’ (p. 21). Her work emphasizes the systemic impact of digital and platform-based infrastructures on collective memory, in particular the ways in which automation and corporate platforms have assumed roles once reserved for archival institutions and professional archivists.
She states ‘how firms who play an infrastructural role in data archives have become today’s archons – those that govern and assert power through the functional sovereignty of data archives’ (p. 11).Acker demonstrates how storage technologies have not only redefined what is preserved but have also reshaped conceptions of memory, ownership, and institutional accountability. Her thesis – that archiving machines shape memory and produce distinct regimes of access and data sovereignty – provides historical context for the challenges in digital stewardship that she identifies in the book. 2
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