The Filing Cabinet: How information became a "thing"
Hey. I wanna welcome everybody, to this discussion of Craig Robertson's The Filing Cabinet, A Vertical History of Information. It's a great new book from University of Minnesota Press. I'm Lisa Gettleman. I'm joined here by Craig himself as well as Shannon Mattern, and we thought we'd start with just a couple of quick introductions so you know who we are and who you're listening to.
Lisa Gitelman:So, Craig, why don't you go first?
Craig Robertson:Okay. Well, I'm Craig Robertson. I'm an associate professor of media studies at Northeastern University in Boston. And, yeah, I've just had the filing cabinet of vertical history of information recently published.
Shannon Mattern:And I'm Shannon Mattern. I'm in the department of anthropology at The New School in New York, but my work is about I'm a historian and theorist of media and design, and I have written books including a couple with the University of Minnesota about library architecture, maps, urban infrastructures. And I do work about how information is materialized in the world. So Craig and I have a lot of interest in common.
Lisa Gitelman:Great. Yeah. And I'm Lisa Gittleman, as I said. I teach at NYU in the departments of English and media studies. And I think that Shannon and Craig's work are really in my wheelhouse too.
Lisa Gitelman:I work on, the history of documents, the media history of knowledge and information. And, I've known Shannon and and Craig for a long time, and it's a delight to be able to talk about this new book. So we were gonna start with a couple of process questions because they always interest me so much. Craig, I wanted to ask you, how did you even come to write this book in the first place? How does a book on the filing cabinet even occur to someone?
Craig Robertson:Well, it seems to occur naturally if one is researching a history of the passport. So whether we go back even further. But, no, this came out of the research for my book on the passport. And while there's some overlap in terms of shared interests in paperwork and bureaucracy, it my interest in the filing cabinet literally came out of my researching for the passport. And particularly when I was at, National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and I was going through nineteenth century US diplomatic correspondence, right to try and find things about the passport.
Craig Robertson:And this had all been microfilmed. It was a microfilm of bound volumes, right, organized by consular officers. And there was almost no index. Right? There might be if you were lucky, there might be an alphabetical index by name, of of sender or receiver, but no subject index, no nothing.
Craig Robertson:And so I'm struggling through these trying to make sense of them. And then I hit nineteen o six. That year is always gonna be etched in my mind. I come to nineteen o six, and all of a sudden the state department has introduced a numerical filing system. And what that means is that every passport office or every consular office around the world shares the same number for a passport for passport correspondence, And all the passport specific passport cases have sub numbers underneath it.
Craig Robertson:And it's all together in one place. Right? So like subject has trumped chronology. And all of a sudden, my research is made exponentially easier and then even easier after 1910, when they bring in an even more complicated decimal based, filing system. And so I was very, you know, I thought this is amazing.
Craig Robertson:Like, I hadn't really ever stopped to think about the way in which moving to file things through a decimal filing system would make such a huge difference and, you know, to avoid or I mean, maybe to introduce the first of many bad puns. I kind of filed that away for future reference, that idea, and then came back to it, later on and did some initial research, read, Joanne Yates' work on the filing cabinet and a couple of other bits and pieces on filing systems. And I discovered that I was not alone in my excitement at the arrival of the filing systems in early twentieth century, United States and globally. And what I did but what I discovered, which I wasn't quite expecting, was the way in which people explain this transformation, right, was a move from the bound book to the filing cabinet. So what happened was in my research, I moved from thinking about the impact of filing systems to the filing cabinet itself.
Craig Robertson:So then the book that I ended up writing became a book that is much more a history of storage than a history of classification. Though I don't wanna lose the librarians and archivists who are listening to us. There's lots of classification and indexing in there, but, but it's sort of subsumed under a history of storage.
Lisa Gitelman:Well, it's a great story, Craig. I I have to share that I had a similar kind of revelation, not with regard to the history of vertical filing in the archive when I hit it, but with the history of the typewriter. You just reach a certain annus mirabilis, you know, just this miracle. All of a sudden, the handwriting subsides and the typing, emerges, and you can read everything so much faster.
Shannon Mattern:Well, we're gonna be organizing our conversation in in, the a file format. So just imagine as we move on to a different category, we're opening a new opening and closing a new drawer on Craig's book. So file two, in con consistent with the question at least just asked about the process of the book. Given, Craig, that this is a Herculean effort of archival research, the book is so beautifully illustrated with so many just fantastic advertisements and brochures from your archival research. I can only imagine how difficult the file management process of writing the book was.
Shannon Mattern:So what if you could talk a little bit about how you created, organized, stored, retrieved, and preserved your own files in producing this book?
Craig Robertson:Yeah. That was there was something I remember talking with Matt Kirschenbaum who when he was writing his his track changes his book on word processing. And he was saying how, you know, that just thinking about the literal process of typing made him really conscious of that and hesitant as he worked on his own. And he worked on that book. And I had a similar thing when I began the research for this book.
Craig Robertson:Because prior to this, I just kind of just use Word documents. Right? You know, and and and and little, you know, and make notes of them in this doing this book, I really, really, as you suggested in your question, Shannon, I really became very conscious of how do I organize things. So I possibly this was more procrastination to avoid really getting into into writing. But I did spend a lot of time trying to figure out and this was like eight or nine years ago to try and figure out how I was going to organize, my archive.
Craig Robertson:And I tried all sorts of different crazy things and then ended up with this weird combination of using the software called Devon Think Pro for some of it, and then Scrivener as I got into writing. And at that point, honestly, the Devon Think Pro software was great because at that point, it was one of the easiest ways to get, OCR, right, to get text recognition. So as I was taking all these photographs, at when I went to archives, because I didn't have a lot of time to stay at archives, So I would take lots of photos, not too much of of ads, but also of, documents, bring them home, do some good text recognition, and put them into, Devon think. And then I did initially because I I guess, you know, I am a child of twentieth century file organization. I created folders and subfolders and organized everything within that.
Craig Robertson:And then I was like, full text search. And so it really was like, so I have this strange strange archive that I created where I had these really detailed breakdowns and organisations, using folders and subfolders, etc, for about the first sort of half of the project. And then it's just like a dump of PDFs, Right? Because then it's like, ah, full text, full text search. It's wonderful.
Craig Robertson:And, yeah, and so and and organize it that way. But the key point, I think, is that it really made me very, very self conscious of my own practices, and how they weren't actually, dare I say it, that efficient. And so I I worked hard on them. And do you do you use Scrivener or Devinting Pro? Or Shannon, I just imagine you have some amazingly well organized, system.
Shannon Mattern:Well, I have a whole bunch of systems going on simultaneously, and I wish there were a way to reconcile them. If I get a grant, I'd love to pay a programmer to somehow kind of merge the various systems I have. I started off using Devon ThinkPro, and that made me very conscious because that seemed to me that software called for a very granular organization of pieces of information. So that, for me, made me essentially perform the action that you're talking about in the book, take knowledge and turn it into information, into granular particular pieces of information. The software seemed to call for that.
Shannon Mattern:That ultimately, after spending an entire sabbatical transferring all my notes and dev and things, realized, like, this isn't really how I think. This is not working for me. So I abandoned it, and I did it with Scrivener. But Scrivener also with its graphic user interface, the fact that it's really based on sheets of paper, index cards, also, again, really materializes a particular, mode of file organization and and, it embodies an epistemology and a mode of working too. So software itself, which you talk about in your conclusion, does have a way of of calling our attention to the way that we, to denaturalizing naturalized modes of working and making us think critically about how we organize our own files because they're often built on a graphic representation of files in some way.
Craig Robertson:Exactly.
Lisa Gitelman:Yeah. No. And and we wanna let let's put a let's put a a bookmark in this because we definitely wanna come back at the end of our discussion, to the end game, or the possible end game of filing, and the the, quote, paperless office, so we can return to these themes. Before we go there, we thought and we we did structure this conversation a little bit beforehand. We thought we should hit some interim files here.
Lisa Gitelman:So file three, file four, file five. File three, related to this conversation we're having, file three is about, storage, itself, because storage ends up being a huge theme in your book, you know, the idea of vertical storage, obviously, from the title, but other, ways as well, the kind of steel case of the filing cabinet, and other things about it. Maybe, Craig, you could start us off again. Just just, you know, how are you conceptualizing storage in relation to the filing cabinet?
Craig Robertson:Well, yeah. So I think the the first basic step was when I was thinking, okay. Now I'm writing a history of the filing cabinet. I'm thinking about it as a storage container. Right.
Craig Robertson:So I mean, there was, you know, that step didn't come necessarily as automatically as you might think. So, you know, I started to think about that. And then it was like, what is a refrain throughout the book? Is this argument that will this claim, right, that storage is not neutral. And what I really wanted to do with the book was, you know, provide a really detailed case study or if you like, or exploration of that claim.
Craig Robertson:And and so part of that was to say, okay. Well, when we think about storage, we're thinking about to store something involves making choices or decisions, and that produces sets of practices. And I tried to think about these as as principles of storage. Right? And that's where I talk about in the first part of the book, verticality and integrity and cabinet logic.
Craig Robertson:Right? And to me, these are these are the ideas that shaped the storage space that the filing cabinet, captured, right, that the filing cabinet, created. And in that, you have issues that I think are common across most sort of storage spaces, which is concerns about enclosure, concerns about protection, concerns about accumulation. My argument is that when it comes to the filing cabinet is a storage container. The response to those concerns about enclosure, security, protection, accumulation are shaped by ideas of efficiency and and system.
Craig Robertson:And that's what makes this a particular moment in a long history of storage and a long history of modern storage.
Lisa Gitelman:Fascinating. And so so the I mean, the story about storage that our listeners may be more familiar with from recent literatures is the storage container. Right? So modularity as a principle of storage added to the to the others, but the one the one you're, you know, working on here really predates that, and forwards a lot of these principles that also apply.
Craig Robertson:Yeah. No. I was there there as I was in particularly when, I also in the book talk about closets and kitchen cabinets in the home as I make an argument about how these ideas of storage move out of the office. And in those, when you're looking through better home and gardens and house beautiful and these magazines from the 1920s, odd pages in there are like looking at an Ikea catalog, right? Like, because what you're seeing what's happening with storage in the home in the 1920s and the 30s.
Craig Robertson:And my argument is this comes out of the office, is this beginning to think about modularity to think about planned storage, to think really about designing spaces for particular objects so that they will fit. And you will know to go put your piece of paper in this file folder or put, you know, the bag of flour in this place in the kitchen cabinet.
Shannon Mattern:And just another resonance that might come up in our the end of our discussion about why this is particularly relevant today is, you know, with more people working from home, they've had to compress a workspace, a childcare center, and all traditional domestic activities in one space, which required all new modes of of of, reorganizing kind of home materials. So storage has been something that's very front and center and and, pressing for people's everyday lives, especially throughout the pandemic. So I guess, a continuation from that, file four would be how do we transform how do we think about storage in relation to labor? You talked about some of the central themes of the book, including things like preservation and closure, but those required human bodies doing particular activities in relationship to the materials of filing. So they're doing things like clipping, compressing, attaching, pulling, sliding.
Shannon Mattern:In some cases, you showed in the advertisements, like, doing handstands on the filing cabinet themselves to demonstrate how strong they are, and these raise questions of gender, race, and class. So why don't you talk a bit about the activities, the labor activities involved in a filing and how they essentially call it for particular filing subjects?
Craig Robertson:Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's thanks for that question. There's a there's a lot in there. You picked a lot in that file.
Craig Robertson:When you and you're sorry. In your question there, Shannon, you you used clipping and grabbing and got grasping and holding and and I think that speaks to one of the sort of most important points I want to make about about the use of the filing cabinet and the type of work that the filing cabinet encourages, right, the type of labor that it shapes. And that is this idea of information being this discrete object that can be held. Right? So again, as I as I hopefully sort of make clear in the book, and I wanna make clear now I'm not saying that the filing cabinet invented this idea of information as a discrete or particular object.
Craig Robertson:But what I am arguing is that it gave it a visibility. Right. And again, perhaps foreshadowing future files that further along in our conversation, you know, obviously, we still talk about files and folders and and as we interact in a digital information environment. But so what I'm interested in with with filing as a mode of labor is that, first of all, it's understood to be a mode of labor that involves the handling of information, that it involves the handling of paper. It involves the handling of information, such that it is understood to be a way of working with information that doesn't require thought.
Craig Robertson:And this thing gets paired with gendered understandings of labour. So we all of a sudden have the ideal file clerk being a woman, right, and being a young woman, ideally, as I talk about in the book, also being a white woman, a middle class woman. But the key thing I just want to talk about at the moment is, is gender, right? And so filing this way of interacting with information becomes a gendering practice, right? It becomes a way of not working with knowledge, right, not having to think, but working instead, with this new thing that is called information.
Craig Robertson:This sort of instrumental form of knowledge, Right? And knowledge, not like knowledge that doesn't require a Noah or a subject in that sense. So is one of the, sort of a common phrase in filing advertisements was the idea of like you a stranger to the file can come and find the document instantly. You don't need to not understand anything about the office. You don't need to understand anything about the contents.
Craig Robertson:You just need to have a basic grasp of the alphabet and be able to read and and look at a tab and grab a file, which is understood to be a discrete piece of information. And I think that's captured most effectively in the way in which filing equipment companies advertised the tabs and folders, right in filing cabinets. So they would generally do that by using an open drawer of a filing cabinet, sort of with a close-up image of the file drawer with its tabs and folders. And they would generally be a file clerk standing there. But because they were focusing on the drawer itself, really all that you saw of the file clerk were these disembodied hands.
Craig Robertson:Right? And they were gendered, just that they were gendered hands, but they were disembodied. So they're almost always women's hands. And so what I found fascinating about that in showing how it sort of modeling how a filing cabinet worked, these advertisements also modeled the ideal mode of labor. Right?
Craig Robertson:The ideal mode of labor that was being called filing. And that mode of labor was one that did not require thought. Right? Because you had these disembodied hands. It just required the ability to grasp and to hold and to pull and retrieve and so forth.
Craig Robertson:I guess that sort of links back to what we were saying earlier in some ways about storage as well. Like this is this mode of labor. Well, that that a technology, a storage technology introduces a particular mode of labor. And in this case, I would argue it's a it's a very gendered mode of labor. It's a mode of labor that is set up to retrieve to store and retrieve a particular object.
Craig Robertson:And that object is information understood as something that is discreet and particular. So not a bound book. Right? So it's not a piece of paper bound into a volume. It's a loose piece of paper, that exists secured temporarily within a manila folder within the drawer of a filing cabinet.
Lisa Gitelman:Wow. And you use this phrase that I love, granular certainty, which I think, you know, it picks up Jeff Nunberg's derivation of information as a kind of discrete particulate substance, like, he says like sand or succotash. So the granularity, of information and granular certainty puts that together so nicely. But now I'm now that I'm listening to you, I'm hearing you say that granular certainty refers both to the discrete bits of paper contained in the files contained in the file cabinet, but also to the hands the unknowing automatic hands of the Falkler.
Craig Robertson:Yeah. Yeah. No. I I think it does. Thanks.
Craig Robertson:Thanks. And thank you. Thanks for the complimentary granular certainty, but also thanks for the nod to Jeff Nunberg as well because clearly it does it does draw on that. And so I was, you know, I was pretty happy when I came up with the idea of granular certainty, because it got me out of a corner that I sort of boxed myself into. And I do make arguments about, as I said earlier about efficiency and ideas of efficiency and productivity and system at this point, in the early twentieth century when the bulk of this book, the period this book is focused on.
Craig Robertson:But what I like about granular certainty is it both acknowledges that argument about the particularity of information, but ties it also to the broader ideas of efficiency. Right? So I'm linking it to efficiency, but I'm not that interested in arguments about or exploring the work that, you know, Alfred Chandler has done and Joanne Yates has done and other scholars have done to say, oh, you know, we need to understand this is a moment when information becomes critical to or central to corporate capitalism or the development of managerial capitalism. I'm interested in granular certainty as a way to think about how efficiency, ideas of efficiency shaped the understanding and conceptualization of information is a thing. And therefore, that ties, as you said, Lisa, to the hands, right, to the particularity, to the focus, to the breaking down of things, to, like, sort of their smallest component parts so that they can be managed and controlled.
Craig Robertson:So in this situation, it's the management and control of labor as well as the management and control of information that that labor is retrieving.
Shannon Mattern:So this maybe foreshadows our file five, where we talk about various genealogies or histories of information.
Craig Robertson:Cross referencing, Shannon. We can cross reference. We're allowed to cross reference.
Shannon Mattern:So before we get there, I wanna just rifle a little bit more through files four to see some other connections that I I was noticing. Because in in focusing on the vertical history of information, you offer us formal genealogies. You talk about this really fantastic world of precursors to the vertical file, everything from boxes and spikes, the people would, you know, that you see at a restaurant where they take the receipts and put them on a big spike, pigeon holes, Shannon files, of course, my favorite, flat files, vertical files, all of which require different actions again as, like, referring back to my previous comment about we have to clip them, we have to attach them with a big we have to put them on a big u hook, we have to compress them into a file, which reminds me of a piece that Lisa wrote for a collection that I edited, like, almost a decade ago about the history of the paperclip and how that's not just a mechanical operation. It's actually an ontological operation too. You're essentially defining what the file is and how it fits into a larger whole, a larger larger system of management, a larger body of knowledge by performing certain actions on it, by attaching two papers together, by stapling them together, by putting them on a hook together.
Shannon Mattern:So it's not just an arbitrary mechanism. There also is kind of an ontological and epistemological significance there too.
Lisa Gitelman:That's a great point, Shannon, and and it does speak to so much that underwrites Craig's book too. Just about the different scales at which we countenance and therefore construct knowledge and information. You know, the paper clip is an incidental thing. Most people will have thought of the file folder and the file cabinet is pretty incidental. The bullet point, you know, is another the Zoom window.
Lisa Gitelman:I mean, you you know, we know and we experience information at all of these different levels. Can we move on to, file five? We had thought, Craig, that we wanted to get you to talk about different ways to historicize this ever present to our current lives category of information. And you clearly have worked within or in light of a business history tradition. You mentioned Joanne Yates in her wonderful book, Control Through Communication, also the work of Alfred Chandler, the kind of dean of American business history.
Lisa Gitelman:But we wanted to talk about other, possibilities for a genealogy of information. And, Shannon, why don't I ask you a question? You've worked extensively on libraries. What does a library history of information look like?
Shannon Mattern:That's a really good question. That wasn't really one I had prepared to answer today, but there there's some cross pollination between the library world and the business world as Craig mentions in the book that we had the library bureau, with, Melville Dewey who clearly saw library management as something that could went beyond the library world. They were developing techniques, technologies, equipment, furnishings, all types of things that had a market that expanded well beyond the library world. Also drawing some inspiration from developments were happening in the business world into libraries. That said, this may be a larger question is if a if a technology is developed within with originally a capitalist impulse or for the purposes of management, is it possible for it to kind of shed the ideologies that it was built for and maybe serve different political end goals?
Shannon Mattern:So if you look at the history of information management in the library world, particularly in kind of the global development, the long term aspirations for the universal library, some of which have colonialist impulses. You wanna develop a universalist a universal library because you wanna colonize the entire world. It's about imperialism. That's kind of the ideological end goal of these manage application of management techniques. But then you also have the people like Paul Atlee, who Craig mentions in the book, part of the whole documentalist internationalist tradition of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries.
Shannon Mattern:As heavy handed as their exercises and operations might have been. The motivation for what they were doing was to create world peace. They thought that by standardizing paper sizes and transforming all the world's knowledge into interchangeable index cards so we could create essentially a universal language of information and exchange that would allow for democratizing knowledge, for democratizing education, and cultivating world peace. Obviously, there's a again, anytime you wanna impose a universal classification system, there's an imperialist motive behind that too. So it does raise these questions if can you take a technology or technique that was developed for a capitalist or imperialist enterprise and use it for more benevolent democratic ends.
Lisa Gitelman:Thanks. You know, I had not sort of picked all that up, but that makes it sound like a happy story, the history of information. I I I got a little concerned at times when Craig was telling the business history version of this, obviously connected, that it's all about some kind of tautological set of conditions where efficiency equals system equals efficiency equals system on the interests of managerial capital as the multinational corporations brings to life.
Craig Robertson:The perspective that I'm sort of coming from, I think, is that in all these examples that Shannon talked about, I think this was partly was your point, Shannon, right, that these these are being put to different ends. They're all emerging out of this moment, when an instrumental form of knowledge is increasingly being seen as important, right and critical to the development of knowledge. And this instrumental form of knowledge is information. So that in that in that library history, like at a more mundane level than Otley, and his great projects is the vertical file. In that emerges in public libraries right at the beginning of the twentieth century, which is a new essentially a newspaper clipping file right in a vertical file cabinet or, and it has newspaper clippings that has pamphlets and and brochures and, and other things in it other bits of loose paper.
Craig Robertson:But to me, all of them are, and all the technologies around them are responses to this moment in the history of information, which is this moment when information this information becomes a label for a particular thing that they may be put to different ends. So in that sense, I feel like, I don't know if it's the business history of information, but it's the efficiency history or the system history of information. Right? So it's not looking at how information is used to improve productivity, you know, to celebrate the growth of corporate capitalism, as you could argue Chandler does. Right?
Craig Robertson:But it's the way in which information is conceptualized.
Lisa Gitelman:That makes sense. So it it's it's about the coherence of information as an object in a discourse that is a centralizing discourse, you know, whether in the vertical file in the library or in the central file of the office.
Craig Robertson:Yeah.
Lisa Gitelman:So they're they're a a breaking point to notice would be, I've done a little bit of work on the history of Xerox, you know, photocopying. And the central file in the office starts to erode once you can quickly walk to the Xerox machine as I did when I worked in an archive and just take a copy of something. So all of a sudden, this the logic of the central file starts to sort of melt away and people have their own files again. Right? I used to just you know, I worked in an archive, and I went I would take a Xerox or something, and I would take it home at night.
Lisa Gitelman:And it was a great way to build, you know, quote, my archive outside of this centralizing logic of efficiency and information.
Shannon Mattern:I think efficiency also has different connotations in different contexts. It can be, again, to produce profit, to maximize profit. It can be to enhance translation. So, again, they have their different ideological ends as well. And, also, if you look about the history of information through science, you know, through classification, which is rooted again in colonialism, this idea that we're gonna travel, explore the Earth, collect specimens, and then label everything.
Shannon Mattern:So maybe colonialism is a is a undercurrent for a lot of these things, but still there's the efficiency, translation, whatever the whatever the mechanism that allows for the transfer of information, the easy access, retrieval. It it can be put to different kind of epistemological or methodological ends. Governments, you know, Craig mentions John Agar's work in the book too. So there, the collection of information for the social contract of having a government. I mean, again, that's maybe again about efficiency, about a particular conception of information, but it's for a a a different political end than we might think of it within business history or the corporation.
Shannon Mattern:Yeah.
Craig Robertson:That that's a great clarification, Shannon. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, efficiency becomes this catchall term, you know, for many different things. And so I think the period I'm looking at, I think efficiency or when I'm using efficiency, it really is that kind of beginning of the twentieth century when saving time becomes the defining problem, right?
Craig Robertson:Because you can think about classification and sciences and other things that might be about making it easier to find something. But I think what happens in this, I guess, going back to Lisa's point, this is the business history perspective of it. Maybe it becomes not just about making it easier to find something. It's about saving time. So it gets connected to to capitalism over and above where it may manifest in other histories that you've pointed out, Shannon.
Lisa Gitelman:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And, Shannon, you're so right.
Lisa Gitelman:You know, our vision is a little bit blurred coming from The US and the kind of the way that Chandlerian perspective has a lock, and our imaginations in some contexts because elsewhere a more statist, view of information and efficiency I think would would would dominate and this, you know, links obviously to the colonial project. You know, in in a way we're just sort of we're we're a little bit blurred, by our focus on the comp the corporation. Another, you know, kind of option to historicize information would be a much more, signal processing, you know, a much more technical account, of signal processing and, you know, information versus noise and things like that. And and that might, you know, be the the pathway we wanna take towards, file six. And that's our last kind of general area of of conversation around, you know, the the so called paperless office, but also the kind of end game for filing and for indexing.
Lisa Gitelman:I mean, Craig, you yourself mentioned that in writing the book, you came to just do word searches, you know, instead of actually relying on the file system that you had so cleverly devised. Are you seeing are you thinking about an endgame for filing the end of filing cabinets as well as for files?
Craig Robertson:I think that well, yeah, I think the file I'm one of the arguments I maybe a little too implicitly make in the book, right, is that the filing cabinet to me is a very twentieth century technology. I was almost gonna say the quintessential, but I'll say it's just a very twentieth century technology. I mean, it emerges right at the end of the 1890s. And I think it's, it's pretty much had its day and, you know, in offices and, you know, I see where maybe it's because where I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I see poor, sad abandoned metal filing cabinets, like literally once a week, at least when I walk around here. And now the end of the semester, I think it's gonna be its peak peak filing cabinet, throwing out season.
Craig Robertson:But I've actually seen less and less of those in recent years because there's no file cabinets, for people to get rid of. And so, yeah, I think in that sense, the filing cabinet itself, you know, it lingered had sort of a a slight nineteen nineties into the early two thousands afterlife as an icon, you know, on our on our computers on our on our desktops. But even that has disappeared. And then in terms of the understanding of the file, I've noticed when this is hasn't happened a lot, but it's happened enough that I've noticed it when students will come to my office hours, and they will, they'll wanna retrieve a document, and they will download it from Google Docs. Right?
Craig Robertson:Or they'll download it from the email in front of me. And then we talk and we go back to it, and they download it again. Right? And and and because there's not this conception of the file is this thing that is now moved onto the desktop. There's not even a conception in what I would understand a file to be.
Craig Robertson:Right? They're not thinking about a file as something on their computer in a folder, let alone some really complicated Devon think pro organizer, you know, hierarchical file structure.
Shannon Mattern:I I was just thinking about the different applications that particularly generations below me are using and how that the going back to what we were saying earlier about how the graphical user interface in a way shapes or materializes the particular ontology of the file for us in a mode of working, in a way of thinking about managing knowledge. If we think more capaciously about knowledge, that includes everything from, like, Instagram post to tweets and how these have their own logic of organization. So what is, again, the granular? What is the granular particularity, in each of those different platforms? What's the unit of knowledge or the unit of information, the datum?
Shannon Mattern:Many cases, chronological. For example, the with the Twitter feed, the the the influx or the influence of algorithms and and reshaping, you know, even beyond our control. Like, the management of files anymore is not just a matter of our volition, our hands, our feminine hands kind of, moving through the tabs, but it's algorithms. We're partnering with artificial intelligence to manage and retrieve our files anymore. So just how complicated it is if we think across multiple platforms and media modalities, what the file is and how it's created, stored, classified, and retrieved, and preserved, which again, because we're relying so much in corporate platforms anymore, Google has no obligation to store our files for us.
Shannon Mattern:You know, I remember when Google Reader went away. Everybody lost all their bookmarks if they didn't migrate somewhere else. So we have so little control because we're so dependent on proprietary systems. Libraries relying on corporate kind of publishers or commercial publishers to maintain their databases of journals. If a if an a ProQuest or an EBSCO decides to do away with a particular journal, you lose access to all those files because it's you don't have a licensed kind of rental contract for it anymore.
Shannon Mattern:So so much of our file management has essentially gone out of our hands because of all these reliance on different kind of commercial platforms.
Lisa Gitelman:It's a good point. For me, the real signifier of that as a transition from our very, you know, kind of twentieth century, intuitive sense of being able to look it up, when I've heard people say search it up.
Shannon Mattern:Oh.
Lisa Gitelman:You know, just just getting out there into the algorithmic cloud.
Shannon Mattern:I don't know if this is a separate question, but I wonder if this is a file six or maybe a files, a file seven or a file six b. But given the so I've heard some people use the terms responsibilization with the decline of the clerical class. Universities in particular, you know, are, in the grand age of universities, I'm imagining what we see in the movies is, like, all the masculine professors, the male professors with their huge offices and their personal assistants. You know, the fact that we have a reshifting of clerical and administrative labor in universities. Enterprise software has does the work of a lot of what formerly a clerical class would have done.
Shannon Mattern:Now that a lot a lot of management of files has been pushed back on and and and to use this kind of awkward term, individual people to manage their receipts, to manage their banking, to do all kinds of things that professional filers would have once done for us. I wonder if you have any thoughts about kind of just the expectation that individual people are supposed to be file management experts in so many specialized domains of life that once we were able to outsource or we once had trained specialists to do for us?
Craig Robertson:I think that, yeah, it's interesting because I feel there were there was maybe was it ten years ago or so forth with the argument was it was interesting. It wasn't that people were becoming their own file clerks, right. But they were becoming their own archivists, right, or the or the language was and I think this is interesting. The language was that we were, we were having to learn to curate our photographs to curate our files, right, but not to file them. Right, which this is not obviously a direct answer to your question, Janet's or comment, right?
Craig Robertson:That I think so that responsibility, as you sort of pointed out is is been occurring over the last several decades. But I think it's interesting that often we're not talked of as file clerks is is doing filing, right? We're curating files or we're organizing files or we're arranging files, but we're not actually doing that sort of highly gendered practice of being a file clerk.
Lisa Gitelman:It's true because the pejorative gender associations were so deeply held and felt that they have to be, you know, kind of stripped out in a sense as we all, you you know, are now delegated to do this kind of work. So this is really returning us to file four on the labor question. And, Shannon, you're I think you're really sort of pointing to just how interconnected the labor question is with so many other things. I mean, I think of, you know, some of the work that I've done on the PDF format, right, and just the kind of realization that once you could move around the document in a semi stable format like that, yes, you were performing clerical labor of some sort, but it also had, you know, sort of profound implications for transportation. Right?
Lisa Gitelman:There's a way in which, you know, if you think of the PDF file, sure, it's ground up paper and ground up ink and ground up file clerks and ground up secretaries, but it's ground up airplanes and ground up trucks and ground up, you know, filing cabinets and ground up everything else. We're we're so completely enmeshed, in these assemblages.
Shannon Mattern:Yeah. And this also extends to I know that, Craig has mentioned the work of Marcus Krajewski in here a few times. So even his more recent book on the server, again, looks at the history of Ask Jeeves, the feminized voice of Siri, for instance. So we have automated assistants who do our file retrieval for us in so many cases. So still these issues of gender and class, just being able to rely on a servant, whether it's a human or an automated version, just continues this discussion of gender labor that Craig talks about in the book.
Lisa Gitelman:Super cool. Here's another question. So, the reason I still have filing cabinets and I have two small two drawer ones is because my desk is made out of them.
Craig Robertson:Right.
Lisa Gitelman:So I can't get rid of them. But one one of them, the little button, snapped closed, so it's a locked filing cabinet filled with files from twenty years ago. How do I get that open?
Craig Robertson:I know. I think you've just gotta get the hammer out. Right?
Shannon Mattern:Just to Lisa's point about the fact that some of us are still reliant on kind of legacy filing cabinets because they still perform necessary utilitarian functions as desks or whatever. In my old department, we moved into what used to be the finance office, which was an open plan office. So imagine a whole entire faculty of 22 faculty moving into an entire big open plan office where the only spatial dividers were the literally hundreds of built in filing cabinets that were kind of about waist height, maybe three and a half to four feet high. It created some sense of spatial partition. Of course, it didn't deal with acoustic challenges or offer any privacy, but there was mixed feelings about the filing cabinets.
Shannon Mattern:We just dumped junk into them because nobody had files to store in these thousands of linear feet of filing cabinets, but they were also necessary because they at least provide some tiny sense of privacy in this, you know, increasing spread of the open the open plan office. So this is maybe some interesting kind of legacy moment where it's talking about the the prior history of filing cabinets and their centrality and how they form this pivotal role in the move to a more, ephemeralized information economy in an open plan office.
Lisa Gitelman:Well, and if we're thinking about, you know, kind of throwback moments, I I wanted to point to one that I found fascinating, Craig, in the book because it picks up not the history of information and how we historicize that, but really the history of knowledge. And, of course, the information knowledge distinction is one that we could spend another couple of hours on, which we won't. But you mentioned, you know, out of, law offices in particular, the way in which individual files, right, so collections of paper in Manila folders came to stand for the case, in question. And this is very much, you know, the case method in law, but it's also the way so many of us operate as scholars, but how knowledge work happens. It happens, to particular cases.
Lisa Gitelman:We make the objects that we study. We make the things that we know, out of our knowledge practices. And so even that history of knowledge has a has a story that goes back to the history of
Craig Robertson:filing. Right. Yes. And, of course, and, you know, and that's a story that, Cornelia Wiesemann takes even further back. Right?
Craig Robertson:And, in her, like, groundbreaking work, on on legal case files, really, in in Germany.
Lisa Gitelman:That was great, Craig. Great, Shannon. Thank you. Same to
Craig Robertson:you. Okay. Well, I just wanna, thank Lisa and Shannon, for coming along today. I was really, excited when, Minnesota contacted me and said, we'd like to do a podcast on the book. And I thought instantly, well, who are the two people that I'd like to talk about the most with this book?
Craig Robertson:And it was Shannon and Lisa, and they agreed. And, I think this has been a really great conversation. And so thank you to Shannon and Lisa, and thank you to Maggie at Minnesota for putting this all together. And I hope you will enjoy it.