The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information

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Description

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.

Robertsons 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 womens 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 todays digital world.

Reviews

"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 Robertsons 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 reverberatefrom 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 filing cabinet] worked to blur the past into the present with active storage; and the future into the present by encouraging forethought. The Filing Cabinet would be particularly helpful for researchers who want to write about media materialism without getting lost in the minutiae of model numbers."LSE Review of Books

"[Robertsons] prowess for raiding an archive is formidable, and he has a talent for cherry-picking unusual details."Washington Examiner

"Captivating . . . the filing cabinet, despite its deep roots in our contemporary information architecture, is just one step in our epistemological journey, not its end."The Atlantic

"Timely, incisive, and impressively imaginative."The New Rambler

"If youre a reader who relishes the unconventional, if youve pondered arcane subjects at odd times, or if you want a conversation-breaker at the water cooler, find The Filing Cabinet. Yep, this is the book you need now."Idaho Press

"Robertson persuasively sets out the ways in which domestic furniture and organising practices were reshaped to mirror those found in offices."Literary Review

"A useful and thought-provoking text for those of us dependent on the filing cabinet and the subsequent technologies they inspire, this book deserves a wider readership in both the art historical and cultural studies fields."College & Research Libraries

"Robertson eloquently describes the historical account of the filing cabinet."International Journal of Communication

"Robertson deconstructs and situates the filing cabinet in its historical contexts of use, with the support of a rich apparatus of beautiful images."H-Net Reviews

Author Bio

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