Join UMSI today for a livestream at noon! Data, Archives and Information in Society (DAIS) Seminar: Amelia Acker, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey TODAY: Fri 3/13/26, 12-1:30pm, Zoom 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. Read ARCHIVING MACHINES for free here https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/6055/Archiving-MachinesFrom-Punch-... Register for today’s Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oveykIL0QcuF6zdtoQaIag#/registrati... -- Kristin Fontichiaro Clinical Professor University of Michigan School of Information 4466 Leinweber Building 2200 Hayward Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121 734.647.3593 Book an Appointment <https://calendar.app.google/tiXYA8E8VX9bCQKZ8> *Projects:* Michigan Makers <http://michiganmakers.si.umich.edu> | Making in Michigan Libraries <http://makinglibraries.si.umich.edu> Data Literacy in High School <http://dataliteracy.si.umich.edu> | Public Library Management MOOC <http://ai.umich.edu/portfolio/public-library-management/>