[Commlist] new book: The Filing Cabinet

New publication from the University of Minnesota Press


*The Filing Cabinet***

A Vertical History of Information

*Craig Robertson***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517909468/the-filing-cabinet/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517909468/the-filing-cabinet/> _*

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*CSLS2021*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31st December 2021. Discount only applies to the 
CAP website

“How we store information reflects the aspirations we have about what to 
remember. Taking this idea to heart, Craig Robertson’s essential history 
of the filing cabinet is the definitive account of verticality and 
efficiency as guiding principles for corporate capitalism.”*—Melissa 
Gregg, senior principal engineer, Client Computing Group, Intel*

“Craig Robertson’s book offers a fascinating account of how the humble 
file cabinet and the associated practice of filing shaped the emergence 
of modern conceptions of information. These influences continue to 
reverberate—from the organization of our computer desktops to our 
assumptions about ‘information’ as a discrete entity that can be stored, 
manipulated, and retrieved. A significant contribution to media studies 
and information studies.”*—Jennifer S. Light, Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology*

“In this fascinating history, Craig Robertson shows how a seemingly 
mundane thing was central to the rise of modern bureaucracies, 
information society, and the gendered relations of office labor. 
Wonderfully researched and full of surprises, /The Filing 
Cabinet/explores an object and a system that orchestrated new ways of 
knowing, remembering, and experiencing the world.”*—Lynn Spigel, 
Northwestern University*

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture 
transformed our relationship with information

The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office 
space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its 
transformative role in the histories of both information technology and 
work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig 
Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that 
information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used.

Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the 
nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were 
arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into 
slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers 
in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically 
changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information.

Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age 
posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an 
“automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information 
labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered 
assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the 
changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical 
workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a 
sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered 
labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we 
interact with information and data in today’s digital world.

*Craig Robertson*is associate professor of media studies at Northeastern 
University and author of /The Passport in America: The History of a 
Document./



*University of Minnesota Press**| May 2021 | 280pp | 9781517909468 | PB 
| £20.99**

*Price subject to change.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------