POST: Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting

In this guest blog post on the Internet Archive by Nichole Misako Nomura (Stanford University), the author shares a brief history of the computational translations of knitting punch cards, starting with how they became proto-versions of code and taking us through the ins and outs of a digitization and preservation workflow. This blog post is recommended for those interested in binary or minimalist code, material culture, history of machines, or hints of data feminism.

From the post:

The knitting machines I own share their punch card dimensions (24 stitches wide) with one of the first punch cards (the Hollerith card, used for the 1890 census, was a 24-column punch card). They’re an important piece of computing history—and crucially, one of the few that isn’t only history because a broad community of people, on- and off-line, are still sharing knowledge on how to hack, restore, and use them.

All punch cards are fundamentally digital, even if we don’t generally think of “digital” as a property physical objects can have. It is only recently that our associations of computing with “the cloud” and other ephemeral metaphors have superseded the fundamentally physical processes that support computation. Working with knitting machine punch cards reminds me that the cloud is a metaphor, and lets me own and manipulate my code in a way I find both challenging and creatively liberating.