Making Data Programmable
The MIT Press eBooks · 2025
The story of how data can be captured in a digital storage format and separated from originating contexts of creation is a process I refer to as "externalization."Today, data can be saved in flash drives and SD cards or easily bundled and transmitted wirelessly as text messages or Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates.These pro cesses assume externalization-data can be moved from where it begins, away from its origins.But this quality was not always so.To understand how digital data is archived today, we must examine the storage formats and technical pro cesses that lead to externalization.This chapter shows that with pro cesses of externalization, data has been distanced from origins of context through technologies of memory and externalized storage.How does data become distanced from its original contexts?The answer has significance for how data is archived, but it also reveals a shift in the meaning of data beginning with mid-century approaches to data processing driven by computers.Early approaches to analog data management involved huge mainframe computers that used manual data pro cessing and static media formats such as paper and magnetic tape for storage and egress.Data was never far from the machines used for pro cessing it.But as mid-century computing technologies and data management developed, new grammars of action emerged with magnetic tape and time-sharing systems that allowed data to be moved and managed more easily.These external forces are embedded in the ways we save and access data today.Time-sharing, data pro cessing peripherals such as tape decks, and interface terminals that incorporated magnetic tape for memory would change how data could be programmed and how fast it could be managed, stored, and shared across networks because of externalization.These began with magnetic tapes.For most people, reels of magnetic tape conjure bygone experiences of listening to cassettes in the car or rewinding video tapes borrowed from the 3