Co-Opting AI: Archives will examine how archives and archiving—as infrastructure, epistemology, and social practice—relate to contemporary AI systems.

Amelia Acker is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research on data management and digital preservation 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’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. Acker is the author of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms (MIT, 2025).

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor on the Promotion Programme in Modern and Digital Culture. She is PI of Data Loss: The Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies (DALOSS) funded by the European Research Council and the Danish Foundation for . The project is premised on the idea that datafication is inherently conditioned by loss, and that this loss can also be generative. Rather than framing loss retroactively as something that can be fixed, patched or recovered, then, DALOSS  investigates loss as actively constituted through social, political, and aesthetic relations. She received her PhD (in Modern Culture) from University of Copenhagen and MA (in Modern Culture) from the University of Copenhagen. She has been a visiting fellow at Duke University, Cornell University and Columbia University.

The event is moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia.