Collection

Lebombo Bone

Middle Stone Age toolmakers

A baboon fibula from Border Cave, in the Lebombo Mountains on the South Africa–Eswatini border, with twenty-nine surviving notches along one edge. Widely read as a tally stick.

Ishango Bone

Later Stone Age toolmakers

A baboon fibula bearing three columns of notches in varying groupings, found at Ishango, Democratic Republic of Congo. Its function remains debated — proposed readings range from a simple tally to a lunar calendar or an early arithmetic tool.

Mesopotamian Clay Tokens

Sumerian agriculturalists

Accounting tokens that were used for farming goods exchange and accounting in Mesopotamia. The tokens were used for thousands of years and led to the invention of cuneiform writing.

Bulla (Clay Round Seal)

Sumerian agriculturalists

Clay envelop in which the accounting tokens were initially placed, then only imprinted on.

Maikop Vessel

Maikop culture artisans

A silver vessel engraved with a naturalistic landscape — mountains, rivers, and animals including lions and panthers — widely interpreted as a depiction of the North Caucasus region as seen from the north. Found in the Maikop kurgan, Adygeya Republic (former Kuban region), Russia. Height 9.6 cm.

Harappan Cubical Weights

Indus Valley Civilization artisans

Cubical weights, mostly made of chert, used across Indus Valley settlements to standardize trade and taxation. They follow a strict binary ratio system (1:2:4:8:16...), consistent across a vast territory.

Nilometer

Civil engineers of Ancient Egypt

A specific type of architecture that was built along the Nile for the Egyptian authorities to monitor the level and turbidity of the river.

Mesopotamian Duck Weights

Babylonian and Assyrian artisans

Balance weights carved in the form of a resting duck, its neck and head folded back along its body, typically cut from hematite or alabaster. Used across Babylonian and Assyrian commerce to standardize trade against the shekel, with strict penalties imposed on merchants caught using false weights.

Qin Bronze Volume Measure (Shēng 升)

State of Qin, standardized under Qin Shi Huang

A rectangular bronze pan with a handle, cast as a standard unit of volume. The type originates with Shang Yang's 344 BCE reform and was extended empire-wide under Qin Shi Huang's 221 BCE unification edict, alongside standardized weights and currency.

Qin Bronze Weight (Quán 权)

Qin dynasty imperial government

A bronze weight cast after Qin Shi Huang's unification of China, inscribed with the imperial edict standardizing weights across the empire. Used with a balance scale for trade and taxation.

Abri Cellier Notched Bones

Aurignacian toolmakers

Two bone fragments from the Abri Cellier rock shelter in the Dordogne, France, each carved along one edge with a long, regular series of parallel notches. Excavated in 1927 by the Logan Museum of Anthropology's George Collie, Abri Cellier is one of several Aurignacian sites in southwest France — alongside Abri Blanchard and La Marche — whose notched bones have been read as early notational or tallying sequences.

The Taï Plaque

Late Magdalenian engravers

An engraved bovine rib fragment from the Grotte du Taï, France, bearing over a thousand tiny incisions on one face — among the densest mark-sequences known from the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, and, like the notched bones of Abri Cellier and La Marche, read within the broader debate over Palaeolithic notational systems.

Paracas Polychrome Mantle

Nazca Culture (central Andes)

Ceremonial Paracas mantle encoding territorial, genealogical, and possibly calendrical information.

Monte Sierpe "Band of Holes"

Chincha Kingdom & Inka Empire

Exceptional topographical site in Peru containing approximately 5,000 regularly spaced holes in the ground, used for goods exchange and accounting during the Inka Empire.

Inka-Style Khipu

Leland L. Locke's book

Inka-style khipu illustrating one of the most important book in the history of khipu deciphering, in which L. Locke determined khipu were numerical devices encoded in base 10. The book was published in 1912.

Yupana

Inka Empire artisans

An Inka counting board, used alongside the khipu for arithmetic — the yupana computed, while the khipu recorded the result. Based on a 17th-century drawing by the chronicler Huaman Poma, later interpreted by Erland Nordenskiöld and Henry Wassén as a grid in which pebbles or grains of maize, placed in different squares, represented different values depending on their position.

Sayhuite Monolith

Inka Empire artisans

A carved granite boulder near Abancay, Peru, covered with over 200 reliefs depicting terraces, canals, rivers, and animals. Some researchers read it as a topographic model used to plan and test irrigation systems.

Korean Rain Gauge Ch'ŭgugi

Joseon kingdom's Research Institute of Astronomy Geography Calendar and Weather

Known as the 'most ancient rain gauge in the world', the Korean rain gauge system was one of the first state-wide rain measuring system.

Mattang

Marshallese navigators

The mattang is an abstract stick chart presentation of how swells refract around an island and meet in a series of nodes. They were used a teaching and mnemonic devices, not for navigation.

Westtown Samplers

Westtown School - by Girls in Sewing Class

Silk globes made by young girls who attended sewing classes at the Westtown School in Pennsylvania, USA.

Jaquard Loom Punched Cards

Joseph Marie Jacquard

Programmable paper cards linked in sequences to control Jacquard looms, allowing complex textile patterns to be mechanically encoded, stored, and reproduced.

Punched Paper Tape

Bruker Instruments Inc.

A continuous strip of paper tape encoding data as a sequence of punched holes, read row by row as it fed through a machine. Used from early Morse code transmission through to low-cost data and program storage for minicomputers and computer-aided manufacturing equipment. This example, B37-60713, is a dual display overlay to QPDFT from Bruker Instruments Inc.

Flight of the Gull Bronze Model

Etienne-Jules Marey

A bronze model made in Italy from Marey's chronophotographic work analyzing the flight of birds.

Herophon Disc

Ch. F. Pietschmann & Söhne

A square punched cardboard disc for the Herophon, a hand-cranked organette introduced in Germany in the 1880s. Unlike most organettes, the disc stays stationary while the 24-note reed mechanism revolves beneath it, reading the pattern of holes as pre-programmed tunes.

Organ Cobs

Autophone Company

Organ cobs or rollers were used in roller organs, and consisted of a cylinder of wood with pins in them that pressed on the keys in the organ to actuate them. Roller organs were a type of reed organ introduced in the late 1880s by the Autophone company of New York, and were an inexpensive and popular means of entertainment for the US market.

Ammassalik Coastline Sculpture

Kunit fra Umivik (Inuit hunter from Greenland)

A sculpted guide to a stretch of coast north of Ammassalik, made by a local hunter to explain navigation to the Danish expedition captain Gustav Holm, who later wrote his deep despise for Inuit geographical artefacts.

IBM Punched Card

IBM

An 80-column punched card encoding data through a grid of rectangular holes, one column per character. Standardized around IBM's EBCDIC code in 1964, it became the dominant medium for entering, storing, and feeding programs into mainframe computers through the 1960s and 1970s.

A Number Between Zero and One

Siah Armajani

A Number Between Zero and One is a conceptual sculpture by Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani, consisting of a stack of paper printouts of an imaginary number—10^-205,714,079—one requiring 25,974 sheets and twenty-eight hours to print.

8-Bit Punched Tape (DataArt IT Museum)

USSR (maker unrecorded)

A Soviet-era punched paper tape (SM EVM minicomputer) bearing a test program in binary code, donated by Irina Lutskova and photographed by Mitya Ganopolsky for the DataArt IT Museum.

A Duet of Blizzards

Nathalie Miebach

A musical score woven from wood, paper, and data, translating meteorological readings from two blizzards that struck New England — one in December 2007, the other in February 1978. 60 x 96 inches.

The Shape of the Sound of the Shape of the Sound

Stephen Barrass

A recursive series of 3D-printed stainless steel bells, each cast from the sound of the one before it — a bell's form generated by CAD, its ring recorded, and that recording's acoustic signature shaped into the next bell, repeated across several generations. Exhibited at CraftsACT, Canberra, in the exhibition Embracing Innovation Vol. 2.

Aster

Grégoire Eloy

The Aster books show a fraction of the 1 million sattelite pictures taken by scientists for a global study on glaciers into 4,000 printed volumes.

Inequalities Quipus

Ewa Tuteja

The project compares through two inca-style quipus, the well-being of Latin America and Scandinavia. It encodes gendered data from the OECD Better Life Index.

Architecture of Return, Escape

Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂)

A hide painting referencing the floor plan of the American Museum of Natural History, part of a series mapping escape routes for Indigenous remains and objects held in non-Indigenous institutions, back to their home communities.

Mississippi Embroidered Map

Anne Lacambre

Reproduced from an ancient atlas for the visually impaired, the map is a tactile, white on white embroidered map of the Mississippi river.

Staring At Empty Space

Lea Wurthmann

A physical installation that showcases the 352 electromagnetic captures required by NASA to produce the 1995 Deep Space image.

Encoded Textiles

Guillermo Bert

A new-media art series integrating QR codes into traditional Indigenous textiles to preserve cultural narratives and immigrant experiences. Woven fabrics from South and Central America embed QR codes that, scanned by viewers, play videos, audio stories, and poems. The current iteration features Maya and Zapotec communities based in Los Angeles; the first iteration was a collaboration with the Mapuche community in Chile. Ten textiles in total, with twenty accompanying audio stories and videos.

Light Sculptures: Matter of Impermanence

Dexter Callender III

Glass sculptures designed from photographic captures of light patterns moving through architecture during the day, from a selection of buildings in Boston (USA).

Codes in Knots

Nayeli Vega

A suspended series of carved wooden knots, each form standing in for a word — verb or noun — in an invented notation system built from knot shapes rather than characters. The project draws a direct line to khipu and other precolonial textile-based recording systems, translating their logic of knotted encoding into a contemporary sculptural alphabet. Shown in the exhibition "Digital Decoding: Digitality as Subject and Method" at Silent Green Kunstquartier, Berlin.

Binary Quilt

Community groups, Cambridge Festival 2026

A quilt encoding information in binary, created with community groups as part of Cambridge Festival 2026 and displayed at The Centre for Computing History, Cambridge in September 2026. The chapter text should tell the story of how it was made collaboratively with those community groups.

Crochet Topography

Noriko Takahama

The artist has created a method to retrieve elevation data and transform them into printed pattern, then used to crochet specific topographies.

Knitting Machine Punch Card

A punched card used to program pattern rows on a domestic knitting machine — each row of holes selects which needles engage to produce colorwork or textured stitches, a direct descendant of the Jacquard card adapted for home knitting.

Space Junk

Nancy Smith

A textile/data-encoding piece by Nancy Smith (details TBD).

52 Blue

Nancy Smith

A data-driven sonification/visualization piece by Nancy Smith, discussed in "Making with Data: 52 Blue" (Perhaps Magazine, Medium).