 that nothing else had ever done before is allow loose paper to stand on its edge. I think I've caught you up. 1890. Thank you, Heather. Invented 1890. So I'm largely talking about the early 20th century for most of this talk. So what are the advantages of storing loose paper on its edge? I'll quickly note two. It's easier to retrieve a piece of paper filing cabinet on its edge than from a pile of papers, right? And it's also easier to find something specific. So loose paper can be grouped together with other relevant pieces of paper, regardless of when it was created. And in fact, it was the latter that first got me thinking about filing cabinet. In research for my passport book, I spent weeks at National Archives in College Park, Maryland, looking for references to passports and thousands of reels of unindexed microfilm records of 19th century US diplomatic correspondence. I wish you were me. And so one day, though, I arrived at records for 1906. That year is forever etched in my mind because that year the State Department started using a numerical filing system. And so suddenly every diplomatic office had the same number for passport correspondence subdivided by specific issues and cases and applications. So rather than scrolling through formally bound pages organized in chronological order, I could go straight to where the relevant information had been gathered in one place. So subject Trump chronology, right? And this completely changed my research and it made it possible to find documents I wanted with limited effort. Okay, I'm just trying to get the screen going. So my epiphany at National Archives was one about classification, but later it became about storage when I discovered that the early 20th century celebrants of decimal classification systems, the people who were excited as I was, channeled their excitement into filing cabinets, right? The key was to move away from storing paper in bound books. So to hopefully state the obvious, the filing cabinet stored pieces of paper, but paper was where knowledge was recorded stored and circulated. So to store paper was to store information to make loose paper accessible was to make information accessible. Therefore, to use the filing cabinet was to interact with information. And that is why I argue the filing cabinet is an important object to study. The filing cabinet allows us to understand a fundamental change in the way in which information was gathered and stored and reused. A change that in its staying power continues to shape interactions with digital information. So not only through files on our computers or tabs on our browsers, but I would argue with digital assistance like Siri and Alexa where women continue to assist people to find information. So acknowledge the current contemporary stuff, but this talk is going to be pretty much a deep dive into that moment of emergence. And I do that because I think it's important to acknowledge the power relations that are integral to information technologies like the file or the tab. So rather than an infrastructural tubes and wires critique, this history makes information and data material by showing that the concepts through which we are still asked to imagine our encounters with information and data files, folders, tabs, et cetera, originated in highly gendered understandings of labor and information. And so in that sense, it kind of reembodies information by showing that the properties of the information technologies associated with filing are the product of historically specific power dynamics. So therefore, like again, general point, I guess, therefore, yes, technologies have affordances that are designed to do some things more easily than others. In that sense, I examine the filing cabinet as an object that is activated in particular ways. It does some things and not others. In that sense, I don't look at the filing cabinet as being inert or frozen. I think about it as an object and operation as something that is activated. It's understood to have emerged as a solution to a set of problems, problems about the storage of paper. However, as a response to these problems, it generated a set of processes that affected thought and action. So therefore, the other kind of sort of idea underpinning this research is that perhaps hopefully not too radical claim that storage is not neutral, right? That storage has a politics. And of course, this raises a number of questions, including, you know, how is storage constructed as a problem? What values go into deciding what to store? Where to store it? How to store it? So what were the problems the filing cabinet solved, right? Well, as I suggested, storing loose paper on its edge allowed it to be more easily retrieved, both the specific content on a sheet of paper and also the sheet of paper itself. So that is the filing cabinet emerged out of a rethinking of storage. So in the 1890s in the office, the storage of paper becomes a problem of retrieval. So storage always involves an awareness of future use, right? But it does not always prioritize the moment in the future when the stored object will be accessed, what we now call retrieval. So as a practice of piling or stockpiling, storage prioritizes the allocation of space to store something, right? Storage takes up space. In contrast, retrieval is conceived as a temple practice, right? The focus is on a process, on facilitating the act of finding something. Retrieval takes up time, right? So why then is storage approached as a problem of retrieval at the turn of the 20th century? Why that change? Well, this period saw ideas of efficiency capture the US business imagination. As capitalism takes on its corporate film and scale in this period, saving time emerges as one of the defining problems of modern Western society. Now, in this book, I offer a detailed discussion of the stakes involved in the storage logic of the filing cabinet. I focus on three concepts, verticality, integrity, and cabinet logic as critical to understanding its development. However, all these concepts or storage logics are underwritten by a concern to save time and increase productivity. So in this talk, in the spirit of efficiency, I'm simply going to use efficiency to explain why I believe that the filing cabinet is not a neutral storage technology, arguing that efficiency is a highly gendered discourse, right, at any period, but particularly this period. So efficiency creates the problems that the filing cabinet solves. I say problems because the filing cabinet responds not only to the problem of timely retrieval, but also the need for information in the first place. So efficiency productivity requires planning. Planning requires information. It requires knowing what to produce and when to produce it. Therefore, information takes on a role in business that it had previously not had. And I should also notice the period when management emerges as a profession as well. So in the remainder of this talk, I want to focus on two ways in which via efficiency, the filing cabinet shaped a particular kind of interaction with information. So first, I'm going to talk about how the filing cabinet makes pervasive a concept of information as a discrete unit as something that exists in the world. And then secondly, I'm going to focus, the second part of the talk will focus on how the filing cabinet brings to the foreground a new mode of work used to handle this information. Information labor emerges as something distinct from knowledge. Okay, so the emergence of the filing cabinet provides an important site to examine a critical moment in the ascendancy of information as a defining aspect of contemporary society, right? To have an information society, you need to have a particular understanding of information. And information becomes a name for an instrumental use of knowledge. Now, as the late Jeffrey Numburg showed, the 19th century saw a move from information as an individual mental process to be informed, to be educated, to a conception of information that attaches it to something that could be possessed and obtained and received and distributed and circulated. So information increasingly becomes thought of as a discrete unit. Now, to be real clear, I'm not arguing that the filing cabinet invented this conception of information, but I am arguing that it offered a way to make sense of this change, right? It came away to grasp information both physically on paper and metaphorically. So this quote up here comes from a 1912 issue of a long-lost magazine called Machinery. And I like this quote because it gives us a sense of this new conception of information. So useful information here we can see was carefully and systematically collected, and then it was classified and digested. Digested not mean eaten, but put into the digest, broken up into pieces, into within books. That is, information emerged from knowledge through an increased specificity, right? And further, classification, objective procedure made information or allowed people to argue that this information was superior, as the quote says, to individual judgment. So this process of division took knowledge and made it accurate information, easily understandable by anyone. And as the last sentence says, instantly available whenever a problem is presented to management efficiency. Timeliness. Inside a filing cabinet, a file drawer showcased this understanding of information in part because it used tabbed guide cards and folders. I inadvertently bought a prop. Tab, manila folder. To make the specificity and classification visible. In its organizational structure, the file drawer allowed information to be retrieved in its specificity. A piece of paper or a manila folder of loose papers could be extracted. So you had all the information on a particular customer or product or passport application. Information was at your fingertips. And this is the period when that phrase takes off. So the idea that you could hold information, not only that you could see it, but touch it as something discrete, goes a long way to explaining how the filing cabinet and tabbed folder became a conceptual gateway to understand modern information. Because, of course, information is something discrete can be represented in many different ways within a statistical table, right, the cells on the table, or in this period that I'm talking about, the organization of a railway timetable. But these made the concept of information harder to grasp. I'll continue to pun on grasp through the whole talk. So as these quotes appear on the slide suggest, this tactile articulation of paper and information frequently appeared in prescriptive literature. The attraction of the filing cabinet to the business information of the early 20th century was how quickly it allowed hands to get that information. It defined classification therefore as a temporal problem as much as a spatial problem, right? Classification is about efficiency in the sense. We'll get to that briefly, but Q&A, yes, yes, yes, lasted for four years. It comes up a few times. Yeah, a lot. Basically, as I should say, every sentence in this talk is open for Q&A, right? This is a summary of my book. Every source is open. Yes, but thank you for drawing attention to it. Slide. So ads claimed a filing cabinet allowed users to find papers at a moment's notice or almost instantaneously. In the spirit of the time, these assertions were quickly quantified. According to one very happy customer, almost instantaneously translated to 20 seconds defined one letter and 90 seconds to file five folders. That's pretty fast. And we'll talk about the hands that are doing that in a moment. In focusing on retrieval, a filing cabinet also challenged ideas of what defined storage. Rather than hiding information in drawers or in pigeonholes or lying flat in piles, that former storage was now understood to be dead storage, right? So rather than that, information needed to be alive, it needed to be standing at attention. There is no subtlety in my archive. Storage was not dormant or dead when you used a filing cabinet. In the 1930s, celebrating the use of a decimal filing system and advertising agency president noted quote that information does not rot in our files. It is continuously shuttling back and forth between file and everyday business use. Claiming that quote, within a few minutes, a clerk could retrieve sales presentations from 30 different companies in 30 different fields. He concluded thus, our file lives. Now, stepping away from the specifics of the file drawer, I want to note that the filing cabinet and the interior of the file drawer are examples of a key technique of efficiency, what I call granular certainty. And this is the drive to break more and more of everyday life and its routines into discreet, observable, and manageable parts, right? Granular signifies the belief that breaking things down produces a higher degree of detail or specificity. Certainty indicates the conviction that greater specificity will reduce individual discretion and increase the likelihood that a task will be completed efficiently. Now, obviously, breaking something down into small parts allowed it to be controlled by enabling it to be more easily apprehended, understood, and connected to something else. This is the logic that is central to Taylorism and the reorganization of factory labor occurring according to standardized tasks occurring at the same time. Now, the analytic value for me of granular certainty is that it emphasizes the overlap between efficiency and abrasive standardization and the particular and a conception of information as something discreet. The vertical filing cabinet and the tabbed manila folder emerge from this overlap between efficiency and this new idea of information. And the file drawer granular certainty created a particular cabinet logic. And here we just have an ad for 150 and 200 division tabbed folders for alphabetical order of names. So breaking the alphabet down, not into 26 letters, but into 150 or 250 categories. So this cabinet logic used paper manila folders tabs to create partitions within a cabinet drawer to decrease discretion and increase certainty. In promotional literature, this cabinet logic became quote the intellect of the filing cabinet to help market the filing cabinet as a machine. Now, as these quotes here show, ads emphasize that the filing cabinet or anthropomorphize the filing cabinet, right? So, as Lisa Gittleman points out, the word automatic came into general use in the 19th century, derived from what? Autonomatone, sorry, that so that is that the increasing use of automatic carried with it quote, lingering connotations of resolving the organic and the mechanical of human forms and functions built into machinery and of mechanical responses by human beings. So as a machine, because that's how the filing cabinet was often marketed, it took on the work of remembering, right? In her 1923 book, filing department operation and control, Ethel Schofield argued that with the increased scale and expectation of 20th century corporate capitalism, an individual businessman could no longer depend on his memory to recall all aspects of his business with the detail that 20th century capitalism demanded. Schofield noted that replacing this memory quote, presupposes a thoroughgoing automatic system for the association of ideas, close quote. Posing the question, can such a thing be secured by mechanical means, she immediately answers, experience tells us yes. Therefore, Schofield calls vertical files an automatic memory. Now automatic in this case really does mean predetermined and taking on the role of thinking of remembering from people, remembering where information was located, office equipment identified as a machine was understood to guarantee order. This was petitions and tabs generating granular certainty, which in the name of efficiency and saving time, directed the user to where the needed information could be found. We're now transitioning to the second part of the talk, information labor. Now that user was understood as someone who operated a machine, hence the importance of the hands of the operator, the hands that had to pick up and hold paper and information. James McCord who founded the New York School of Filing, this might be another thing Heather, yes they taught filing in high schools and they were private schools. In 1914, he used his textbook to stress the need for a clerk to possess physical dexterity. I'm not going to read the quote in full, but the point here is that although the filing cabinet lacked the mechanical parts that underscored scientific management, celebration of dexterity in the factory, McCord's description illustrates the importance of hands and fingers to filing in the office. Filing demanded more than the mere handling of paper, it involves selecting, grasping, removing, lifting, placing, fingering, drawing, putting. So fingers displace objects, and fingers grasp and displace objects. They isolate them and they gather them together. They manipulate and shape objects. So guided by the intellect of the filing cabinet, the hands of a file clerk manipulated information. Not in the sense of falsifying information, but in the sense of handling it, of moving information within the office. This is a period when the concept of workflow emerges. A whole lot in the book about that. The granular certainty that articulated information as a discrete object via loose paper also underwrote the labor of the file clerk whose work enabled its circulation. And in fact, the file clerk emerges as a distinct occupational category because the work of the 19th century clerk, a man, was broken down into a number of distinct specialized tasks, including typing, bookkeeping, and filing, to be done by women. So filing was an example of clerical work that emphasized the necessity of particular bodies interacting with a machine. The action of these bodies was also separated into discrete parts to better manage the labor following the logic of granular certainty. So in the words of one filing manual author, mind, eye, and hand can soon be trained so that they automatically act together to do the teamwork that is invaluable. Now the brain is part of this team, but only because as labor historian Harry Braverman argues, to the extent that clerical work quote is still performed in the brain, the brain is used as the equivalent of the hand of the factory worker in an assembly line. This idea of filing is information labor. I use information labor to label office work as it was redefined as machine work. Now information labor is not a distinct occupational category, rather I use the term to refer to a type of instrumental encounter between workers and information that became increasingly common throughout the 20th century and is still with us in the 21st century. In its ideal form, this is an encounter that requires neither thought nor interpretation and does not directly produce knowledge, a product of discourses of system and efficiency that fits into a conception of work that depends on rational and calculated procedures. So information work is not knowledge work and nor is information work men's work. This is very clear in the advertisements that introduced the filing cabinet and the work associated with it. Gender underwrote the distinction between information labor and knowledge work in the office, identifying it as women's work reinforced its secondary status. Men could do these tasks, but they were things that man, aka a knowledge worker, could do on the side without any thought. A catalogue description for a so-called efficiency disk, which included file draws, made this point with the lack of subtlety that is critical to the genre of the trade catalogue. Quote, each compartment should represent a fixed place so that the hand of the executive will reach automatically for desired records without interrupting the continuity of brain action. In this scenario, a man filed, but only while he thought about something else. He reached over to the drawer as a matter of habit while the file drawer as a machine worked to locate information for him. A file drawer remembered that allowed the male executive to keep thinking about matters deemed productive. As an executive in the gendered office hierarchy, a man was employed to think. His work was the priority of the office. Promotions for the filing cabinet further emphasized it was designed as an object to be used by women. Some catalogs claimed that women's bodies affected the dimensions of the filing cabinet, so the cabinet should only be four draws high because, quote, that is about as high as an ordinary girl can work to advantage. Similarly, a drawer was only 27 inches long because it could be pulled, quote, by the file clerk as an arm operation. Any longer, it would become a walking operation, meaning the clerk would have to move to the side of the drawer to reach into the back. So therefore, in case you have been wondering all your life, what is the vanishing point of utility? The vanishing point of utility is very close to 27 inches. It's not 27 inches, but it's very, very close. In another type of ad manufacturers sometimes used a close-up of the interior of a file drawer to illustrate how a cabinet worked, so they could claim their folders, guides, and tabs, and follow-up blocks as unique. And in these ads, a woman's body disappeared, though her arms and hands might remain. And in this example, she is literally erased from the image. Now, why the close-up of the drawer was arguably necessary to show the guides and tabs? The fact that it removed the body from the image meant that the pair of disembodied but gendered arms and hands not only pointed out the cabinet logic of the interior of the drawer, but also shows us, show us the ideal relationship between labor and technology necessary for the cabinet to be labeled automatic. Hands or arms separated from their bodies and minds suggested that the user, the users of this office equipment, did not have to think as they worked. Therefore, disembodied hands and filing advertisements represented work that was neither independent nor constructive. As Janet Zandy argues, quote, truncated hands represent metanomically and ignored whole, a lesser human element and species. Since the 17th century, this truncation has been applied to workers where they're identified as hired hands or simply hands. In filing an information labor, it was only natural in this period that these hands would belong to women. Advocates invoked as common sense and association between a woman's hands and dexterity to naturalize the construction of the new machine-based information work, or sorry, to naturalize the new machine-based information work as feminine occupations. By 1943, Evelyn Steele, editorial director of vocational guidance research, could confidently note, quote, it is generally agreed that women do well at painstaking tedious work requiring patience and dexterity of the hands. The actual fact that women's fingers are more slender than men makes the difference, close quote. Now, this idea was usually linked to work in leisure activities. The former invoked women's work in light manufacturing or textiles. For the latter, it was often noted that socially acceptable leisure practices provided ways for women to enhance their apparent natural dexterity and thus gain informal training in filing. As one manager commented, I often ask a girl if she plays the piano or if she knits, crochet, sews, or does another type of work that would enable her to acquire speed with her fingers. Shockingly, despite this natural connection between feminine hands and hands and files, sometimes the automatic memory of the filing cabinet failed. When it did, those hands were explicitly reconnected to a body. I mean, this filing was the fault of the file clerk, never the filing cabinet or the filing system. As a mode of misuse and error, misfiling is what Victoria Owell calls a bodily malfunction. That is, the cloak of invisibility covering the body drops away the moment the body makes a mistake. So, misfiling makes visible a very particular body, that of a young woman. As one company magazine asked, can misfile misfile? The answer was yes. And it was due to her youth and her misunmarried status. This was the very same youth however, that was of course critical to her efficiency or at least the cost efficiency of her labor. The work of file clerks was efficient in part because dominant beliefs about gender and sexuality lowered its cost. File clerks were poorly paid not only because they were women and young, but also because they were unmarried. What Ma Hicks called an assumed heteronormativity created a family wage and an informal marriage bar. That is, a young woman was never assumed to be a household's main breadwinner, so it didn't matter what you paid her. And once married, she would of course stop working at the office, either by choice or force, and go and stay home and look after her husband and the kids that would inevitably follow. So this unmarried status and the assumption that all women wanted to marry men was viewed as the immediate cause of filing. So from this perspective, unmarried women who worked close to men could be distracted by the thought about potential husbands around them. Surveys of women office workers did support the belief that marriage was a priority for young women who worked in offices, but it is not clear if it dictated their actions in the office. Assuming that marriage dominated sorts of female clerks, work advice literature focused on managing female desire. Unwanted sexual advances in a harassment from men were not behaviors to be managed or even publicly discussed. It was the responsibility of women to curb their emotions and quote, the feminine instinct to attract, to awaken her response, close quote. In a space where as the male manager of an employment service, possibly this guy in the photo here, put it, women were hired to quote, add to the general attractiveness of the office. An experienced female office manager instructed file clerks, quote, to leave fine clothes, the theater, pleasant parties, and Tom Dick and Harry at home, which also raises the idea that our clerks had quite the home life, I think, with Tom Dick and Harry with them. This was necessary because if a woman brought such thoughts into the office, it would break down the teamwork of senses and the mind, quote, as she says here, important tasks cannot be accomplished with your hands while unimportant details fill your head. You cannot file amusement under work. They are at the extremes of the alphabet. She must have been very proud of that line. Thus, Ms. File would miss file if she failed to compartmentalize, if she failed to keep her personal concerns and work duties in their proper place and order. That is the explanation for her behavior, it invoked the very act of miss file, right, of putting something in the wrong place. Perhaps it's not surprising that the filing cabinet was offered as a tool to teach young women to better order their lives by controlling their thoughts and desires, especially when these women were often the daughters of immigrants working in a space coded as middle class. And office manager argued that office technologies would teach these young women, quote, the three necessities of efficiency, concentration, accuracy, and good nature. She explained concentration as the need to control your thoughts as you must your pencil with a firm grip despite outside disturbance and inward annoyance. I think we all felt that. However, it was not only office technologies like the pencil and the filing cabinet that could teach women the necessity of efficiency. When a woman left the office as apparently she would to become a wife and mother, she used new domestic storage technologies that reinforce the value of productivity and efficiency. In the 1920s, storage in the home changed dramatically. Prior to this, storage spaces were not factored into the design of houses. So for example, closets and cabinets were not designed to store specific objects. This changed as the cabinet logic of designated places and partitions in office furniture became critical to how spaces were managed and objects stored in the home. This was seen, for example, in response to the early 20th century closet problem. Previously, after thoughts or a little more than wall cavities, closets became purpose built. They were organized, the enclosed spaces of closets were organized into smaller spaces, just think IKEA catalog. However, the main action in terms of home storage was in the kitchen. As kitchen design became a thing that filled the pages of house and garden, house, beautiful ladies, home journal, et cetera. It began with standalone cabinets that turned kitchen storage into the strategic use of shelves, drawers and partitions. In this way, the modern kitchen was linked to the office through a faith in a cabinet logic that prioritized meticulously organized interior storage to make things accessible. This was captured in the Hoosier cabinet. Six foot high and four feet wide, its large shelves and drawers held such items as pans, kettles and nests of mixing bowls, all in specially designed spaces. Promotional materials claimed that a Hoosier cabinet had 400 articles all within an arm's reach. Manufacturers and writers were keen to acknowledge the depth to the office. Vertical or upright partitions called files were added to shelves. We still see them sometimes today that allows plates and platters to be stored on its edge. Quote, you can pick out with one hand just the dish that you want. Ads to be expected were much more succinct. The business of getting meals, the kitchen needs to be business like, and in this ad we can see a little cut out of an office with a filing cabinet and with the vertical verticality of the skyscraper as well. Now, as implied, when announcing the move from the office to the home, what I see important in these changes in home storage is that they illustrate that storage technologies require a certain form of labour performed by a particular worker. Storage is not neutral. An encounter with these technologies encouraged women to understand their self-worth through productivity. As the interaction between hand and object became the representation of efficient labour in the home, these economic values became a way to express identity. Addressed in these way, these women participated in a reconfiguration of attitudes towards self and work performance that helped make productivity common sense. An adjustment that Mel Gregg argues gives productivity its 20th century history. I want to go further and link these changes to information. To say although changes in domestic storage did not address information as a formal category, they do offer a suggestive example of how people experience modern information via the materiality of storage technologies. So granular certainty, cabinet logic moved to the house and brought with it a particular form of work centred on an idea of the particular and the specific. By way of conclusion, I want to restate some key arguments by briefly discussing two of my favourite research discoveries that I couldn't fit in the paper earlier. Now the first is a trade catalogue from a Michigan-based company called Shaw Walker. In the early 20th century they advertised their filing equipment under the slogan built like a skyscraper. I can explain later what that means if you are really curious. The reason I'm interested in this is it's campaign places filing at the centre of the gendered division of the modern office albeit from the perspective of the male. The built like a skyscraper campaign constructed a series of physical encounters between male and female bodies and the company's filing cabinets to illustrate different aspects of the essentials of office equipment. Strengths, rigidity, easy operation, noiselessness, economy of floor space, maximum capacity and good design because we always think of good design when we look at a filing cabinet. So it showed men jumping into open drawers, lifting their bodies off the ground and hanging from open drawers what the catalogue calls handstands. The latter image were used to signify the rigidity of the drawers as opposed to the strength of the drawers illustrated by men jumping into them. I'm going to come back to this but I just want to say other companies did something similar using photographs of men sitting or standing in the open drawers of the filing cabinets. The point of this was purportedly to show that a filing cabinet was built to hold the weight of paper because four drawers each drawer weighing 75 pounds is a lot of weight and you want to know that not only will the filing cabinets fall apart but that the drawer can open smoothly against the little girl down the bottom there but I would suggest the filing the bit like a skyscraper campaign is not subtle at all in the ways that it represented these issues right it doesn't take much I think for anyone armed with some basic theories of gender representation to argue that this brief exercise routine and the advertisements seem to reflect the anxiety that men felt about the arrival of women clerical workers in offices the phallic skyscraper the unshift tip of the walrus building in the background the rigid and erect male athletic body all sort I would suggest humbly to make explicit the masculinity of the men who worked in the office. Such masculinity was not to be questioned and this is reinforced by the image the campaign uses to demonstrate the easy operation of the filing cabinet where not only do they choose a woman or a female body to open the file drawer they choose a child they choose a child pulling on a silk thread the idea being here that I think you know if a child can do it anyone could operate a filing cabinet if anyone can file the filing requires only the strength and the intellect of a girl then only women should file because men can do other work that women can't do. The second find I want to finish where there's a nationally syndicated cartoon from 1921 reprinted in Heather's favorite magazine filing that ran for four years as part of a failed attempt to get filing recognized as a profession. The cartoon in a very odd way can be used to illustrate the effects of capitalism on information or rather the changing shape of capitalism on information so in it we see here a male file clerk um quits after his boss refuses to increase his pay before he leaves in an act of defiance he removes the papers from the filing cabinet and throws them around the office and the final two panels the boss changes his mind and the clerk gets the news of his pay increase while surrounded by loose papers and files. This image stood out to me when I found it because when the boss makes the decision to increase the file clerk's pay he calls them Mr. Google right and then the coincidence of the name Google being associated with access to information is pretty uncanny which and it became basically ridiculous when it's digit the image itself as we can see is digitized by Google right so yes this board is on the ridiculous this coincidence but I also find it a useful way to illustrate that categories of information overload and information management take vastly different forms at different historical moments at one time as I've argued the filing cabinet was the symbol of orderly information management by the end of the 20th century Google search has taken that mantle in the comic strip Mr. Google sabotages the filing system right by spilling papers out of their proper locations ironically this results in exactly the kind of giant pile of papers i.e. the web made up of pages that googled it corporation I know it's technically alphabet with that ruins my point here Google the corporation provides access to through page rank the chaos Mr. Google creates is exactly the chaos that Google later on promises to manage that is although different both the filing cabinet and the search engine became organizing principles for the capitalist management of information and I will stop there magazine I'll just start one question which is filing cabinet makes this emergence in the 1890s at the same time that machine cell phones elevators typewriters like all the machinery in modern offices are happening once and do you think is there a connection across the machines that you think is important or is the filing cabinet machine or key system of that moment most important one and the other I think there are connections and there are things that make the filing cabinet unique so I think the connection between all of those things is that the operation of those machines is what I call information waiver right so this is this moment in which there this this this very sort of instrumental encounter interaction with information comes to define work and you don't have to necessarily like understand the the context or I mean all the content of what you're doing you're just helping the information circular so I think that that connects them and so in that sense I'm implicitly arguing that they're all they're all connect they're all in some way making manifest a particular idea of information distinct from knowledge what makes the filing cabinet a particularly useful example of that moment is the way in which it allows us to really understand the sense of information right in such a significant way that the filing cabinet the files the tabs the folders continue as I said at the beginning of the talk to sort of these are the ways in which we're asked to think about our encounters with information so that to me is what the the way the filing cabinet stands out and I think it is important I mean the filing cabinet is arguably more important if we think about storage in the value of storage because that's where information is stored right like the filing cabinet becomes absolute absolutely critical infrastructure to allow like the to allow the modern world to function right like it's critical to governance it's critical to corporations right because that's how information is stored and retrieved and you know if if there was another technology that did that then I probably would have written about that in in one sense but the filing cabinet did and of course like all infrastructure it's kind of ignored but it's just this thing and the labor associated with it. That starts me so fascinating. Oh yeah. That paper is like a filing cabinet to file the people and you need that you know that you know you need the elevators to get people to the 20th floor so they can work so they can go in their slot for people there whatever be in your spot after. Yeah exactly and that's what I meant like the first chapter of the book after the introduction is called verticality and it explores all those connections right and in fact to the point that I sort of argue that when capitalism takes on its 20th century form it has a vertical bias right you know and I think we can see that in all the things that you mentioned like the skyscraper here that I put up on the screen and the elevator but also thinking about well the filing cabinet but also thinking about management hierarchy right the vertical ladder like you know verticality I really do think it has a vertical bias until the network arguably comes in as a hurry. Oh. There are various men and she moves up in the building the camera shows outside the building it goes up it's it's amazing I will stop monopolizing. No no no it's great no yeah yeah. And then we have some queues uh people queued up in our Q&A as well. I have another question. Hi um so I want to talk a little about the haptic element of some of your arguments right this idea of touch and sort of storage and touch and how we were related and kind of bringing it to contemporary storage of the cloud and the drive and the sort of the the reality of that right like the non-existence of a touch but in fact there are other drives that you know contain the data and I guess I wonder like do you see the non-hor- like verticality of contemporary like you see contemporary storage practices not haptic ones or I mean do you see them as as changing this this this kind of vertical structure of capitalism or not? Um yeah I think that um I always I always have to you know um begin hesitantly begin these these questions because I you know I am in a historian by trade right so like I obviously I think about it and I come to this through contemporary questions and issues but it's not it's not where my head fully goes. So yeah part of the thing part of the point I want to talk about here is that when I'm arguing that storage is not neutral in the ways that you've just talked about contemporary storage not being neutral it speaks to you know like different values or different ways in which storage has been defined right so the notion of verticality I think is absolutely central to how storage is understood within the context of capitalism right in the early 20th century. I think as capitalism changes and I sort of you know just throughout when I was talking to the responding to Heather's points you know saying that like in the middle of the 20th century or the second half of the 20th century the network we can argue becomes important and then you can think about a horizontal bias you know and then you know the cloud you know and then we can think about concepts of the cloud and that less tangible understanding of storage is another further development and issue I think it really affects how we think about storage right if because the things aren't piling up there you know you don't turn around and have an entire wall of CDs or an entire wall of records right and so so that lack of like that the the listening of that haptic dimension to that individual specific item of storage I think completely alters how we think about storage right it makes storage live in a way that the filing cabinet you know is not at all but I think you noted this too but there's still we can't deny the haptic dimension that is still there you know in terms of how we how we access things but yeah so so definitely I mean that I think these are issues and part of what I always you know every in a historian's hope right is that people are much more invested in contemporary issues can take some of the concepts that history has allowed us as historians to think about and you know and apply them you know and really develop them but yeah I could go on with that and I may if there are no other hands. Anyone have a question that I missed the first couple of minutes of talking. So apparently I was wondering was there a specific company behind promoting those because you know it's it's connected to my my real question is to what extent that system of the vertical filing the filing cabinet also translates to other countries right you know it has to do of course with that capitalistic idea of a company you know promoting those those ideas in terms of efficiency. Sure yeah so so the vertical filing cabinet is an American invention right it comes out through the 1890s there's not really one there's not you know it's it's very much of its time so there wasn't really one inventor per se though if you go to Wikipedia there's a nice invention story for you and it is actually kind of appealing because they credit it the company they credit it to is a company called the library bureau which was founded by Melville Dewey of the Dewey Gessimal system right even though he was no longer part of the company when they were when when they were attributed with inventing the filing cabinet it also links it to the library and the card catalog and all those things so you have so the filing cabinet really does take off as an American product and and build this office equipment company office equipment industry most of the companies are based either in the midwest or in upstate new york for a variety of reasons by the 1920s the vertical filing cabinet is starting to be exported right and it has an impact in europe but you know you have lived in europe you know that the vertical file there is not the vertical filing cabinet right it's the arch binder right and that's the arch binder that in some ways Cornelia Wiesman and in her canonical book Files which is sort of a media archaeology of the legal file like she talks about vertical files and that but they're the binders right so i have not explored and i'm not going to um um play with stereotypes to you know to you know um to figure out why it is in in in many countries the file remains that binder concept versus the draw but i if that was part of your question i i definitely absolutely acknowledged that distinction yeah maybe it's a lack of skyscraper is there another question over there yeah hi um so i know that like modern filing cabinets have the safety feature where you can't open multiple doors at once did that um like start when it was first invented or like that come later yeah that's a great question about sort of security and privacy right which of course is another important key aspect of storage often so um what the initial initial filing cabinets didn't come with locks and this was a concern about security locks came in but it was it was it was just simply a lock that locked all four yeah that locked all four drawers right um and um it's yeah was it sorry was that what you were asking was that when they you can only pull out one at a time or um when you open multiple doors you're just toppling oh sorry yeah yeah so it did not have that mechanism sorry i i missed i missed that yeah so it had a lock to lock four um to lock four drawers but no it's well into the 20 middle of the 20th century when you they develop the mechanism to stop them all coming out and so that is that concern right of them toppling over which is part of what those guys doing their their handstands right you know and pull-ups on the and jumping into the filing cabinet is meant to say hey you know look this drawing of a man you know shows that all these photographs these people sitting in show that it can take this weight and it's not sorry it's not gonna tip over so was that did I get to it eventually always yeah so sorry so the question Professor Craig, can you say one example of partiality that you found? Practicality, partiality. Looking at information. An example of partiality. Sorry, I'm a little lost on that question. Yeah, I'm going to have a viewer have another word or an update to that. Bias, I know. So, okay, I'll keep answering your biases. Okay, thank you. Okay, biases that you found in looking, okay. Maybe I kind of spoke too loosely in the talk. Maybe this is where this question came from. I think, so, yes, I mean, of course, the information within the file, the sort of file cabinets can represent multiple biases, right? The argument about information being objective, right, is that information is something that can exist separate from the context in which it's created so that it can be interpreted very easily, right? This idea of information is something different from knowledge is information having as having sort of a facticity, right? Like, so it's not data, but it has a facticity. So I was talking, when I was talking about it being objective, I was talking about the conception of information, right? As an entity, as a thing, not the actual, if you like, stuff on the piece of paper. Does that make sense? I mean, I don't know if that makes sense. So, so yeah, there's a lot of bias within the files and folders themselves. I'm just going to keep moving through images up here. Origin of information, where did you go to find that origin of information as a concept? Right, so I'm drawing pretty heavily on the work of Geoff Numburg for this Geoffrey Numburg. There's an essay called Farewell to the Information Age in a book he co-edited with Paul Doogood, I think, called The Future of the Book, that came out in the early 1990s, right? And it's this beautifully written essay that is incredibly smart and has shaped a lot of the work in media studies, but the work of people looking at the intersection of paper and information. So someone like Lisa Gittleman, for example. So yeah, so Numburg is arguing that in this period, as I think I mentioned very quickly in the talk, in the 19th century information moves from being a process, right? Being informed, being educated, to being a thing, to being something that you can possess. And that is that it's something that can exist or that is an entity. And there's also a special issue of the journal History of Human Sciences, I think, which goes through and talks about the development of the 19th century of the idea of data through the uses of the way in which the census in Europe and the United States comes to be represented. So again, you've got tables, right, that are all representing information, you know, as something that is discreet, right? That has therefore some kind of presence in the world, right? And it's understood that the idea is that you can look at the stuff at a glance, right? Meaning you, as John Seely Brown and Paul Doogood put it, like, you know, knowledge needs a knower, right? It needs a subject, it needs a person, but information doesn't have a knower, right? It doesn't have a, you know, it's understood to be this thing that exists in the world. And so what I find fascinating about the filing cabinet is that through the concept of the file, this kind of sort of abstract understanding of information is something distinct from knowledge that's starting to percolate through society from the middle of the 19th century on, suddenly there's a tangible way you can conceive of it, right? Because now you have this loose piece of paper, you know, in a file folder in a drawer and you can extract this one piece of paper versus having to get the entire, you know, big bound book and have to look through it and scroll through it. So that it's that idea of the particularity of paper, I think, helps underscore this notion of information as a discrete unit. Now, I'm pushing it a bit further with the file cabinet, but other people have made, you know, a similar argument in that sense. And I think it's a really attractive and appealing argument. And for me, what I find particularly fascinating is in this period, as I read through the literature, the word information is being used, but so is knowledge and so is data. And it might be like instrumental knowledge or structured knowledge or organized knowledge. There's just a struggle. People are fumbling around to try and name something that's new. That's the way I read it, right? And so, and then information becomes the thing, you know, that is the name for that kind of specificity that isn't numerical, right? That isn't data. So data takes on that in the early 20th century, takes on that name. And so, you know, like no one in the early 20th century is saying they're living in an information age or an information society. But again, I think, you know, part of the way I locate the book is in what I call the genealogy of the ascendance of modern information, right? So this is a very particular period and an important period in that moment before we go to, you know, to the middle of the 20th century, you know, and information becomes, you know, information becomes, I can't think of anyone's names, you know, MIT guys, I'm completely blanking, you know, where information becomes something that you, yes, yes, with these massive huge figures, where information becomes something that you can measure. And that's another form, a technical form of information, which is also part of the story. But I think this proceeding that is an important part of the story, just to be able to think about information as a unit, even if that unit becomes something different because of the work that happens around here. I'm wondering if you look in any, like, other versions of information that you did with the matrimonial information that was the talk, I think there were lots of other artifacts. Yeah, so, I mean, so the card catalog, right, becomes, it's key to that, right, and, and businesses are using card, like that, you know, businesses still use the equivalent of a library card catalog often to record the ledger, the bound book ledger can become a card ledger, right. I mean, there are many ways in which, you know, the cabinet comes in the card catalog cabinet or versions of it come into the office. So that's the I think that's the other really main sort of competing thing, the punch card right is is the other one right, but punch cards in this period, they're really not in a lot of businesses compared to the filing cabinet and the card but yes, those, I mean those, I think those are two other, if you like, competing ways of conceit, of thinking about this conception of information, but they definitely don't have the sort of uptake that the filing cabinet does. And then of course what makes the filing cabinet interesting looking back is the fact that files and tabs etc are how we still think about information. We don't think about the card, right, you know, like Scrivener might want us to go back and think about, you know, the card but we don't think about a card or a catalog and that way in the punch card, you know, like whereas we do think about the file, you know, in multiple ways, both as the icon on our desktop but also the directory system, right. These men's book file, it's only, if you, I don't read German, well I have to read the German is a longer version where I think she expands a little bit more on this, but an English translation is just a very short nod to the current moment, but she really traces a history through legal records and the registry of the idea of the file in terms of directory nesting structure, whereas sort of I'm looking via the filing cabinet, more as the file as icon on the desktop. Right. She talked more about the gender as a work, not just physically feminine, female sexuality as a problem. You referenced, you know, unwanted advances, sort of an issue but also you said they were undestussed in a way so there's the problem that a woman naturally brings this sort of threat because she's feminine and irresistible and she brings it to the office and it has to be managed but it doesn't seem to be, they're trying, it feels like trying to downplay that because if you open that up it becomes too much of a threat, too dangerous and I'm thinking, I'm just wondering how much there is ambivalence there. And that's I'm nearly starting to think once again about Hollywood films and specifically from like the 1929 to 30th century period before the production code, where you do have films like baby doll that I referenced where the woman who is the secretary who files is inherently a sexual threat, sexual danger in the workplace. But then you have quite a few films that are ambivalent, and really it has to do with like how you script the film you need to, the sort of bad throne, the engineer, right. So the film, skyscraper souls is like the perfect example of this right sorry we're willing to help with had this boss figure of these preco movies, right. Who, you know you have this secretary struggling not to be right and then you have the old hand who's been through several bosses and part of the job, you know, it's horrific right and the film acknowledges it as horrific. There's sort of fascinating ambivalence about women in this corporate workplace that you see in popular culture, and I'm just curious how much of that ambivalence really comes through in all of this interesting person. Yeah, so so so my comments are about sort of the about the harassment, you know, which, you know, this image here right of this creepy guy just staring at this woman here. She refusing to make eye contact this is an ad to make you want to buy a filing cabinet right. Like, so, but a lot, but a lot of that stuff draws from secondary sources right so which you may not be familiar with Lisa Fine wrote a book, which looks at and analyzes all of these films and other popular cultural artifacts at the time. Sharon Strom is where I took a lot of the comment about about not discussed like being acknowledged but not discussing the behavior of men. So in the but in the sources that I found so I was looking at vocational sources right so vocational literature and all the how to office manuals and all this other literature that was out there to recruit women into the office. And in that there was no ambivalence right like you know the responsibility was squarely on the shoulders of women to behave themselves. And as I said that quote like you know to check there apparently you know natural desire to throw themselves at you know at any man. And this was fought through clothes right that's what like so what clothes were acceptable to be worn in a one in the office right and that was in that quote about as well as leaving Tom Dick and Harry at home you left all your fancy clothes at home right and so that becomes a site where yeah a site of struggle over where where it seems that female workers are trying to express some sense of themselves through the through the sexuality right but um but yeah I didn't. So yeah I did not find that that ambivalence that that you can't you're right that is there and in my under you know in my limited understandings of those films and that sort of whole subgenre of the office wife. Right which you know is in fact one I think called the office wife and then there are you know that's a recurring character right where where you know she is the threat in the sense you know like she is she's become his wife in the office right it's not you know it's not my office buddy kind of joking thing but you know today but you know it's my office wife isn't through. Yeah I mean and this is of course way outside the period but the apartment from 1960 is exactly what you're talking about or what we're talking about here with the gender issues of the boss right from secretary secretary and then you know the secretary becomes the wife slot and then you need a new secretary for that to be your office wife and so and so it's post that it's post code right it's 1960 it can really sort of drill into this. Yeah yeah no so there's a lot of dynamic there is some really smart histories of of essentially the history of you know sexual harassment in the office right in the modern office that have been written coming largely coming out of lit out of English literature but but really interesting ways where people have explored this you know and and like I say to me in terms of that literature this makes a very small contribution by just saying well in this vocational literature we can see this is going on right and I think there is some connection to the mode of work that women are doing in the office. So filing was a magazine published for four years. It's published for it's all on Google. It's all you can it's got on Google books and it's all been scanned and it ran for four years and it really was part of an attempt to professionalize filing. So librarianship had just been professionalized archivist work was about to be professionalized and so people wanted filing to be professionalized and that's what this magazine pushed. They were filing associations founded in major cities generally in the Northeast that have monthly meetings maybe 100 people would show up maybe 20 people would show up. I guess person would go and deliver their talk on this is how we file and you know in the insurance company I work for you know this is how we file in this church right you know and they would meet once a month. Have a little chat and you know and so that's you know and so that's where that magazine came from but it's all up there if you want to read and it just you know every it's a clearing house for information about how to file. And sadly, I thought it would play a bigger part in the book but it's there when I talk about this failed campaign to professionalize. In a special training program because you mentioned that there's a new profession emerging. Yeah, yeah so there's some so there's sort of fails right but but they are trying to teach filing right and so they're the the office equipment companies create different ways to teach filing so this is from Lowell High School just up the road in 1923 and they're using library bureau equipment. And what the library bureau did, which is really radical right is that they reduced right letters down to these small sizes right so you would then file them in these boxes because the problem was it was really hard to teach filing because filing cabinets took up so much space and you had to line up to take your turn to file the letter right and so they would the office equipment companies constructed this these courses right that could run from 24 classes up to 72 or 96 class one hour classes in filing. Now I didn't find any school or even any private school that took up 96 lessons but they would incorporate the lessons into into the commercial education courses that girls were being channeled into because this is also a period like in the beginning of the 20th century. I think it's 5% of American teenagers go to high school. So there's this concerted effort to get kids into high school. And so this is where vocational education emerges as as something that's taught in high schools. So filing comes in as in as part of that right and this is also I found just as an aside complaints from English professors and so forth that they were being forced to teach technical writing and all the stuff that we maybe think of as a late nine late 20th century early 21st century problem was a consequence of the success of bringing in vocational education. So by the 1930s pushed along no doubt by the depression about like 70 70% of teenagers are in high school. I'm correct in recalling that this is the same moment that home economics as a field is invented. Well, I mean it was a lot earlier but again it takes up right but it's that same thing that how can we keep people in high school like we want them in high school and of course what happens is the business community shockingly takes over the conversation and pushes it to a lot of commercial education but women do filing and typing and boy sorry girls do women filing and typing and boys do accounting and management, you know, proto management courses and things like this right. So yeah, these are again is a is a is a manual for teachers right. And the bottom what these are the letters and the thing is the letters can be filed in different ways depending if it's subject filing geographic filing alphabetical name filing right. And so it's again teaching the kids to very quickly look they're taught to read very quickly. Right they call it like the dictionary or the direct telephone directory method where you just look for the first three letters of the last name to know where it's going to go. Right you don't have to read the whole thing again don't need to know right you're you're you it's this form of information later. Um, um, um, yeah, you know, I'm thinking about the data and our sense that now we have too much data, he didn't use that too much data, but now it's much data. And then the paper, big paper is there a paper. This is like, there's just too much, I mean, there's too much information if you need to file 40 files and 60 seconds or whatever. Yeah, or one minute, whatever it is, it's because it's just an incredible amount of information. Yeah, no it definitely is like it's a it's a moment of information overload, right. You know, and that's what I like about that Google comic strip like these different modes of information overload, but I feel this is a really, you can call this information overload, because it's understood it's what's being overloaded is understood as information not paper. Right, it's called that. But if people talk about information overload prior to that, they may be talking and like it's overwhelming amount of knowledge but it's literally not called information by the contemporary actors right. And so I think this is a real important example. You know, I've an early form, you're completely right of information overload, and the filing cabinet seeks to manage that, you know, and, you know, and again it comes up with this conception. What the filing cabinet doesn't but what emerges as a conception of information akin to data, like, you know, let's remove it from context, so we can better do something with it so let's remove it from the context of a bound volume of 19, you know of the correspondence of the Madrid office of, you know, of the US Embassy, you know where there might be passport stuff in the middle of it but it's all bound in this big book, but now we can isolate it as these discrete things we don't need to understand the context of what's going on in the dread in the Madrid office to understand this thing about the filing about the passport, but the implication is we did when it was a bound volume type. Passport is also great. Yeah, so much about it. I'm wondering, like, are there, are there ways that the cabinet function that the exclusive space just to hold information on the accessible to specific people. Right. And are there, you know what I mean, are there ways we can understand that exclusivity differently. Yeah, that's a great question and I, I was kind of surprised about that because I, you know, I have for another set of reasons I have a lot of interest in the way in which the archive has been thought about, particularly by historians of the British Empire, and, and, you know, and other people like thinking of and and Laura Stoller and so forth but particularly within the British Empire and and you know through the 19th century again it's towards the end of the 19th century that it but there's a more systematic way to organize the records of the British Empire because prior to that literally just piles of paper dumped somewhere as these reports that these poor colonial official has been forever crafting just get arrive in London and just get put in a pile right. So I was expecting and maybe thinking that I would find something, you know, something connected to that to the very question you're asking but in the literature that I was looking at, I didn't find it. Now, you know, I'm not writing a history of classification I am writing a history of storage so so that negates part of what you said but still where you ended up the final point of your question. I think is really important. And so, you know, I found, you know, the closest I got was just finding, you know, debates and concerns about security and privacy just sort of in general, right, within an office so right to a filing cabinet. There was discussions of private filing, you know, the private filing cabinet of a man in his office separate from the larger filing cabinets of, you know, the battery or as they call them, you know, the dozens of filing cabinets that occupied the center space, you know, of an office right. But yeah surprisingly, and it's not to say it's not there it just wasn't there in the literature that I that I was looking at. But I think it you know it is a it is a really really important question about like how the filing cabinet is a mode of storage is understood to exclude right you know in terms of that like access and type of knowledge right because these women have all this. This is something that isn't again that you know I'm looking at the ideal representation of it to make an argument. But you know these women, while the idea is set up that they can look they can move they have to file really quickly. Right but they do ultimately have access to all this stuff. Right and there is sadly it's actually not one of the ones I pulled up here and didn't use but there's a great ad that I found from the mid 1930s from one company where it's like, she controls your history. Right, you know and so you know so you know there's like an in that kind of playful way there's like a little bit of an acknowledgement of it but no. I'm rambling on because I like I think it's a great question but yeah I can't I can't give you something about how to recognize the question insight. Yeah. or subversive or illicit purposes within corporations. I'm curious about how they might have been repurposed by employees. Yeah, and she says this question might be redundant considering what you're currently saying. I mean it is kind of right yeah but again, I didn't, you know that part of it is the limitations of the archive right so the archive skews to the official literature, you know in the sense right. And so you know I, and it's, it's hard, you know like, I really didn't find like diaries or journals or something where that might be recorded or I was also looking at the you know I was looking at the archives of such as they were of the companies, the filing equipment companies like the book would never have been written. If I was going to choose, you know to really take a deep dive into various companies and how file cabinets were used so that's, you know that that's where I may have found that right, but what I didn't find in the how to literature or the or the literature in a magazine like filing or any or its successor the file. What which was more of a pamphlet was that I didn't find people addressing that as a problem, which doesn't mean as when we were talking about, you know, the harassment of men sexual harassment it doesn't mean that it was in the problem, but it definitely wasn't a problem that was that was talked about. Yeah, so what all that comes in is miss filing, which is understood to be a distraction, right like from distraction not not intentional, there's not an intentional thing. You know it's a distraction or it's or it's stupidity, right like like a lack of, you know, a sort of yeah because these are the daughters of immigrants right so it's a lot of race. I focused on gender today but obviously it goes, you know, it goes hand in hand with race ethnicity and as I did sort of briefly not to sexuality. I'm pushing up at 630 so I just want to thank Craig Robinson again for joining us and I'll see you all around the class, but you and our distance folks at our club. Thank you so much.