Welcome to the SIM Card Archive

The SIM Card Archive is both a special collection and a research site for developing new methods of experiencing and researching digital data through mobile memory artifacts. The collection describes SIMs as physical artifacts, unrelated to the data on them, in an attempt to visualize and understand the way these artifacts and  have changed, and continue to change, throughout time. While tecnology archives and museums have begun incorporating mobile technologies to support access and exhibition experiences, few have focused on the cultural heritage of mobile artifacts by collecting and preserving mobile divices and their digital traces.  

As artifacts, SIM cards represent an opportunity to use OCR technologies to read layers of text and numerical digits. These technologies are often used to convert digitized documents into machine-readable text, but have yet to be employed on artifacts like SIMs, in part due to their multidimensional nature and layers of text and numerical digits.

These artifacts have been collected by Dr. Amelia Acker, director of the Critical Data Studies Lab at The University of Texas at Austin, over the past 15 years.