Book Review of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platform
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23974/ijol.2026.vol11.3.613Abstract
This article reviews the recent title "Archiving Machines: From Punch Chards to Platforms" by Amelia Acker. This book traces the advent of our current information environment of networked, de-localized data through the evolution of the machines that hold data. The review gives an overview of each chapter of the book, covering topics such as the failed attempt by the United States to create a National Data Center in the 1960s, and how the modern personal computing revolution that begin in the 1980s changed consumers' expectations of data mobility. The negative impacts of our modern data environment is also probed and evaluated, and the book is found to be of high interest both to the general public and students of the history of data and archives.
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References
Acker, A. (2025). Archiving Machines. MIT Press.
Caswell, ML. (2016). “’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies”. UCLA. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bn4v1fk
Data Fragmentation Viewed from the Perspective of Contemporary Archival Theory." Information & Culture 53, no. 2 (2018): 203-242. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/690388.
Loughnane, Christopher, and William Aspray. "Rethinking the Call for a US National Data Center in the 1960s: Privacy, Social Science Research, and Data Fragmentation Viewed from the Perspective of Contemporary Archival Theory." Information & Culture 53, no. 2 (2018): 203-242. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/690388.
Wallace, D. F. (2009). This is water. Little, Brown & Company.
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