Co-Opting AI: Archives
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia invite you to a new discussion in the series “Co-Opting AI.” This will be a completely virtual event.
This event 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 of Modern and Digital Culture at the University of Copenhagen. Her research examines the politics of data, archives, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructures, with particular attention to questions of loss, preservation, memory, and power. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project DALOSS (Data Loss: The Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies). She is the author of The Politics of Mass Digitization (MIT Press, 2019) and co-editor of Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data(MIT Press, 2021). Her public writing has appeared in The New York Times, including a 2025 guest essay on the political erasure of government data co-authored with Richard Ovenden. She serves on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.
Mona Sloane is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA). As a sociologist, she studies the intersection of technology and society, specifically in the context of AI design, use, and policy. She also convenes the Co-Opting AI series and serves as the editor of the Co-Opting AI book series at the University of California Press as well as the Technology Editor for Public Books. At UVA, Mona runs Sloane Lab which conducts empirical research on the implications of technology for the organization of social life. Its focus lies on AI as a social phenomenon that intersects with wider cultural, economic, material, and political conditions. The lab spearheads social science leadership in applied work on responsible AI, public scholarship, and technology policy. More here: monasloane.org.
The Co-Opting AI event series is convened by Mona Sloane. It is hosted by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, and Sloane Lab.