Amelia Acker

Amelia Acker’s research is known for exploring the intersection between digital technologies, information infrastructure, and cultural memory in contemporary society. Her interdisciplinary work combines empirical studies, historical case analysis, and theoretical inquiry, often in collaboration with technologists, historians, archivists, librarians and artists. Acker’s projects address the representation and loss of digital traces, the history of data management, and the transmission of information through time. She investigates how infrastructure and organizational practices shape the preservation, accessibility, and governance of data, with a particular focus on the impact of platforms, software, and AI on archives and digital memory. She is the author of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms (MIT, 2025).

Acker’s research has been supported with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the ACM History and Archiving Fellowship.

Acker currently serves as an editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics, co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Data and Society, and co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Critical Data Literacies. Through these editorial roles, she contributes to advancing scholarship at the intersection of data, culture, and society, fostering dialogue and new methodologies across disciplines.

Ph.D., Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
M.L.I.S, Library and Information Science, University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies, University of California, Irvine