Amelia Acker (Rutgers University) has published an open access book through MIT Press, Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms. This book tells the “story of the rise of networked data through the evolution of archiving and digital storage” through advancing
… our understanding of memory, information, and data by charting the struggle between the computing technologies that archive data and the cultures of information that have led to platforms that assert control over its use. Amelia Acker examines the origins of data archives and the computing processes of storage, exchange, and transmission. Each chapter introduces data archiving processes that relate to the evolution of data sovereignty we experience today: from magnetic tape and timesharing computer models from the 1950s, to the establishment of data banks and the rise of database processing and managed data silos in the 1970s, to file structures and virtual containers in cloud-based information services over the past 40 years.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Jing Han, Abbie Norris-Davidson, Taylor Faires, Olivia Staciwa, Trip Kirkpatrick, Mimosa Shah, Camille Charette, and Kelly Karst (Editors-at-Large), Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Molly McGuire, and Rachel Starry (Editors for the week), Claudia Berger, Ruth Carpenter, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Linsey Ford, Pamella Lach, Hillary Richardson, and Christine Salek (dh+lib Review Editors), and Tom Lee (Technical Editor).