June 28, 2021 • 44 mins
Craig Robertson’s THE FILING CABINET explores how this now-neglected artifact profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet continues to shape how we interact with information and data in the digital age. In this episode, Robertson, who is associate professor of media studies at Northeastern University in Boston (also author of THE PASSPORT IN AMERICA), is joined by Shannon Mattern, professor of anthropology at The New School in New York City, and Lisa Gitelman, professor of English and media studies at New York University. This conversation was recorded in May 2021.
About the book: z.umn.edu/thefilingcabinet
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Lisa Gitelman (00:06):
Hey. I wanna welcome everybody, to this
discussion of Craig Robertson'sThe Filing Cabinet, A Vertical
History of Information. It's agreat new book from University
of Minnesota Press. I'm LisaGettleman. I'm joined here by
Craig himself as well as ShannonMattern, and we thought we'd
start with just a couple ofquick introductions so you know
who we are and who you'relistening to.
(00:27):
So, Craig, why don't you gofirst?
Craig Robertson (00:29):
Okay. Well, I'm Craig Robertson. I'm an
associate professor of mediastudies at Northeastern
University in Boston. And, yeah,I've just had the filing cabinet
of vertical history ofinformation recently published.
Shannon Mattern (00:42):
And I'm Shannon Mattern. I'm in the department
of anthropology at The NewSchool in New York, but my work
is about I'm a historian andtheorist of media and design,
and I have written booksincluding a couple with the
University of Minnesota aboutlibrary architecture, maps,
urban infrastructures. And I dowork about how information is
materialized in the world. SoCraig and I have a lot of
(01:02):
interest in common.
Lisa Gitelman (01:04):
Great. Yeah. And I'm Lisa Gittleman, as I said. I
teach at NYU in the departmentsof English and media studies.
And I think that Shannon andCraig's work are really in my
wheelhouse too.
I work on, the history ofdocuments, the media history of
knowledge and information. And,I've known Shannon and and Craig
for a long time, and it's adelight to be able to talk about
(01:24):
this new book. So we were gonnastart with a couple of process
questions because they alwaysinterest me so much. Craig, I
wanted to ask you, how did youeven come to write this book in
the first place? How does a bookon the filing cabinet even occur
to someone?
Craig Robertson (01:38):
Well, it seems to occur naturally if one is
researching a history of thepassport. So whether we go back
even further. But, no, this cameout of the research for my book
on the passport. And whilethere's some overlap in terms of
shared interests in paperworkand bureaucracy, it my interest
in the filing cabinet literallycame out of my researching for
(02:02):
the passport. And particularlywhen I was at, National Archives
in College Park, Maryland, and Iwas going through nineteenth
century US diplomaticcorrespondence, right to try and
find things about the passport.
And this had all beenmicrofilmed. It was a microfilm
of bound volumes, right,organized by consular officers.
(02:22):
And there was almost no index.Right? There might be if you
were lucky, there might be analphabetical index by name, of
of sender or receiver, but nosubject index, no nothing.
And so I'm struggling throughthese trying to make sense of
them. And then I hit nineteen osix. That year is always gonna
be etched in my mind. I come tonineteen o six, and all of a
(02:44):
sudden the state department hasintroduced a numerical filing
system. And what that means isthat every passport office or
every consular office around theworld shares the same number for
a passport for passportcorrespondence, And all the
passport specific passport caseshave sub numbers underneath it.
(03:07):
And it's all together in oneplace. Right? So like subject
has trumped chronology. And allof a sudden, my research is made
exponentially easier and theneven easier after 1910, when
they bring in an even morecomplicated decimal based,
filing system. And so I wasvery, you know, I thought this
(03:29):
is amazing.
Like, I hadn't really everstopped to think about the way
in which moving to file thingsthrough a decimal filing system
would make such a hugedifference and, you know, to
avoid or I mean, maybe tointroduce the first of many bad
puns. I kind of filed that awayfor future reference, that idea,
and then came back to it, lateron and did some initial
(03:52):
research, read, Joanne Yates'work on the filing cabinet and a
couple of other bits and pieceson filing systems. And I
discovered that I was not alonein my excitement at the arrival
of the filing systems in earlytwentieth century, United States
and globally. And what I did butwhat I discovered, which I
wasn't quite expecting, was theway in which people explain this
(04:14):
transformation, right, was amove from the bound book to the
filing cabinet. So what happenedwas in my research, I moved from
thinking about the impact offiling systems to the filing
cabinet itself.
So then the book that I ended upwriting became a book that is
much more a history of storagethan a history of
(04:35):
classification. Though I don'twanna lose the librarians and
archivists who are listening tous. There's lots of
classification and indexing inthere, but, but it's sort of
subsumed under a history ofstorage.
Lisa Gitelman (04:48):
Well, it's a great story, Craig. I I have to
share that I had a similar kindof revelation, not with regard
to the history of verticalfiling in the archive when I hit
it, but with the history of thetypewriter. You just reach a
certain annus mirabilis, youknow, just this miracle. All of
a sudden, the handwritingsubsides and the typing,
emerges, and you can readeverything so much faster.
Shannon Mattern (05:10):
Well, we're gonna be organizing our
conversation in in, the a fileformat. So just imagine as we
move on to a different category,we're opening a new opening and
closing a new drawer on Craig'sbook. So file two, in con
consistent with the question atleast just asked about the
process of the book. Given,Craig, that this is a Herculean
(05:33):
effort of archival research, thebook is so beautifully
illustrated with so many justfantastic advertisements and
brochures from your archivalresearch. I can only imagine how
difficult the file managementprocess of writing the book was.
So what if you could talk alittle bit about how you
created, organized, stored,retrieved, and preserved your
own files in producing thisbook?
Craig Robertson (05:54):
Yeah. That was there was something I remember
talking with Matt Kirschenbaumwho when he was writing his his
track changes his book on wordprocessing. And he was saying
how, you know, that justthinking about the literal
process of typing made himreally conscious of that and
hesitant as he worked on hisown. And he worked on that book.
And I had a similar thing when Ibegan the research for this
(06:16):
book.
Because prior to this, I justkind of just use Word documents.
Right? You know, and and and andlittle, 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 organizethings. So I possibly this was
(06:37):
more procrastination to avoidreally getting into into
writing. But I did spend a lotof time trying to figure out and
this was like eight or nineyears ago to try and figure out
how I was going to organize, myarchive.
And I tried all sorts ofdifferent crazy things and then
ended up with this weirdcombination of using the
(06:59):
software called Devon Think Profor some of it, and then
Scrivener as I got into writing.And at that point, honestly, the
Devon Think Pro software wasgreat because at that point, it
was one of the easiest ways toget, OCR, right, to get text
recognition. So as I was takingall these photographs, at when I
(07:19):
went to archives, because Ididn't have a lot of time to
stay at archives, So I wouldtake lots of photos, not too
much of of ads, but also of,documents, bring them home, do
some good text recognition, andput them into, Devon think. And
then I did initially because I Iguess, you know, I am a child of
twentieth century fileorganization. I created folders
(07:41):
and subfolders and organizedeverything within that.
And then I was like, full textsearch. And so it really was
like, so I have this strangestrange archive that I created
where I had these reallydetailed breakdowns and
organisations, using folders andsubfolders, etc, for about the
(08:02):
first sort of half of theproject. And then it's just like
a dump of PDFs, Right? Becausethen it's like, ah, full text,
full text search. It'swonderful.
And, yeah, and so and andorganize it that way. But the
key point, I think, is that itreally made me very, very self
conscious of my own practices,and how they weren't actually,
(08:23):
dare I say it, that efficient.And so I I worked hard on them.
And do you do you use Scriveneror Devinting Pro? Or Shannon, I
just imagine you have someamazingly well organized,
system.
Shannon Mattern (08:36):
Well, I have a whole bunch of systems going on
simultaneously, and I wish therewere a way to reconcile them. If
I get a grant, I'd love to pay aprogrammer to somehow kind of
merge the various systems Ihave. I started off using Devon
ThinkPro, and that made me veryconscious because that seemed to
me that software called for avery granular organization of
pieces of information. So that,for me, made me essentially
(08:58):
perform the action that you'retalking about in the book, take
knowledge and turn it intoinformation, into granular
particular pieces ofinformation. The software seemed
to call for that.
That ultimately, after spendingan entire sabbatical
transferring all my notes anddev 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 withScrivener. But Scrivener also
(09:19):
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 fileorganization and and, it
embodies an epistemology and amode of working too. So software
itself, which you talk about inyour conclusion, does have a way
of of calling our attention tothe way that we, to
(09:42):
denaturalizing naturalized modesof working and making us think
critically about how we organizeour own files because they're
often built on a graphicrepresentation of files in some
way.
Craig Robertson (09:51):
Exactly.
Lisa Gitelman (09:53):
Yeah. No. And and we wanna let let's put a let's
put a a bookmark in this becausewe definitely wanna come back at
the end of our discussion, tothe 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 thisconversation a little bit
(10:14):
beforehand. We thought we shouldhit some interim files here.
So file three, file four, filefive. File three, related to
this conversation we're having,file three is about, storage,
itself, because storage ends upbeing a huge theme in your book,
(10:34):
you know, the idea of verticalstorage, obviously, from the
title, but other, ways as well,the kind of steel case of the
filing cabinet, and other thingsabout it. Maybe, Craig, you
could start us off again. Justjust, you know, how are you
conceptualizing storage inrelation to the filing cabinet?
Craig Robertson (10:53):
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 thinkingabout it as a storage container.
Right.
So I mean, there was, you know,that step didn't come
necessarily as automatically asyou might think. So, you know, I
started to think about that. Andthen it was like, what is a
refrain throughout the book? Isthis argument that will this
(11:16):
claim, right, that storage isnot neutral. And what I really
wanted to do with the book was,you know, provide a really
detailed case study or if youlike, or exploration of that
claim.
And and so part of that was tosay, okay. Well, when we think
about storage, we're thinkingabout to store something
involves making choices ordecisions, and that produces
(11:39):
sets of practices. And I triedto 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.
Right? And to me, these arethese are the ideas that shaped
the storage space that thefiling cabinet, captured, right,
(11:59):
that the filing cabinet,created. And in that, you have
issues that I think are commonacross most sort of storage
spaces, which is concerns aboutenclosure, concerns about
protection, concerns aboutaccumulation. My argument is
that when it comes to the filingcabinet is a storage container.
(12:20):
The response to those concernsabout enclosure, security,
protection, accumulation areshaped by ideas of efficiency
and and system.
And that's what makes this aparticular moment in a long
history of storage and a longhistory of modern storage.
Lisa Gitelman (12:39):
Fascinating. And so so the I mean, the story
about storage that our listenersmay be more familiar with from
recent literatures is thestorage container. Right? So
modularity as a principle ofstorage added to the to the
others, but the one the oneyou're, you know, working on
here really predates that, andforwards a lot of these
principles that also apply.
Craig Robertson (13:01):
Yeah. No. I was there there as I was in
particularly when, I also in thebook talk about closets and
kitchen cabinets in the home asI make an argument about how
these ideas of storage move outof the office. And in those,
when you're looking throughbetter home and gardens and
house beautiful and thesemagazines from the 1920s, odd
pages in there are like lookingat an Ikea catalog, right? Like,
(13:23):
because what you're seeingwhat's happening with storage in
the home in the 1920s and the30s.
And my argument is this comesout of the office, is this
beginning to think aboutmodularity to think about
planned storage, to think reallyabout designing spaces for
particular objects so that theywill fit. And you will know to
go put your piece of paper inthis file folder or put, you
(13:48):
know, the bag of flour in thisplace in the kitchen cabinet.
Shannon Mattern (13:51):
And just another resonance that might
come up in our the end of ourdiscussion about why this is
particularly relevant today is,you know, with more people
working from home, they've hadto compress a workspace, a
childcare center, and alltraditional domestic activities
in one space, which required allnew modes of of of, reorganizing
kind of home materials. Sostorage has been something
(14:12):
that's very front and center andand, pressing for people's
everyday lives, especiallythroughout the pandemic. So I
guess, a continuation from that,file four would be how do we
transform how do we think aboutstorage in relation to labor?
You talked about some of thecentral themes of the book,
including things likepreservation and closure, but
(14:34):
those required human bodiesdoing particular activities in
relationship to the materials offiling. So they're doing things
like clipping, compressing,attaching, pulling, sliding.
In some cases, you showed in theadvertisements, like, doing
handstands on the filing cabinetthemselves to demonstrate how
strong they are, and these raisequestions of gender, race, and
(14:55):
class. So why don't you talk abit about the activities, the
labor activities involved in afiling and how they essentially
call it for particular filingsubjects?
Craig Robertson (15:04):
Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's thanks for that
question. There's a there's alot in there. You picked a lot
in that file.
When you and you're sorry. Inyour question there, Shannon,
you you used clipping andgrabbing and got grasping and
holding and and I think thatspeaks to one of the sort of
most important points I want tomake about about the use of the
(15:25):
filing cabinet and the type ofwork that the filing cabinet
encourages, right, the type oflabor that it shapes. And that
is this idea of informationbeing this discrete object that
can be held. Right? So again, asI as I hopefully sort of make
clear in the book, and I wannamake clear now I'm not saying
(15:46):
that the filing cabinet inventedthis idea of information as a
discrete or particular object.
But what I am arguing is that itgave it a visibility. Right. And
again, perhaps foreshadowingfuture files that further along
in our conversation, you know,obviously, we still talk about
files and folders and and as weinteract in a digital
(16:08):
information environment. But sowhat I'm interested in with with
filing as a mode of labor isthat, first of all, it's
understood to be a mode of laborthat involves the handling of
information, that it involvesthe handling of paper. It
involves the handling ofinformation, such that it is
understood to be a way ofworking with information that
(16:32):
doesn't require thought.
And this thing gets paired withgendered understandings of
labour. So we all of a suddenhave the ideal file clerk being
a woman, right, and being ayoung woman, ideally, as I talk
about in the book, also being awhite woman, a middle class
woman. But the key thing I justwant to talk about at the moment
(16:55):
is, is gender, right? And sofiling this way of interacting
with information becomes agendering practice, right? It
becomes a way of not workingwith knowledge, right, not
having to think, but workinginstead, with this new thing
that is called information.
This sort of instrumental formof knowledge, Right? And
(17:18):
knowledge, not like knowledgethat doesn't require a Noah or a
subject in that sense. So is oneof the, sort of a common phrase
in filing advertisements was theidea of like you a stranger to
the file can come and find thedocument instantly. You don't
need to not understand anythingabout the office. You don't need
to understand anything about thecontents.
(17:40):
You just need to have a basicgrasp of the alphabet and be
able to read and and look at atab and grab a file, which is
understood to be a discretepiece of information. And I
think that's captured mosteffectively in the way in which
filing equipment companiesadvertised the tabs and folders,
(18:01):
right in filing cabinets. Sothey would generally do that by
using an open drawer of a filingcabinet, sort of with a close-up
image of the file drawer withits tabs and folders. And they
would generally be a file clerkstanding there. But because they
were focusing on the draweritself, really all that you saw
of the file clerk were thesedisembodied hands.
(18:24):
Right? And they were gendered,just that they were gendered
hands, but they weredisembodied. So they're almost
always women's hands. And sowhat I found fascinating about
that in showing how it sort ofmodeling how a filing cabinet
worked, these advertisementsalso modeled the ideal mode of
labor. Right?
(18:44):
The ideal mode of labor that wasbeing called filing. And that
mode of labor was one that didnot require thought. Right?
Because you had thesedisembodied hands. It just
required the ability to graspand to hold and to pull and
retrieve and so forth.
I guess that sort of links backto what we were saying earlier
in some ways about storage aswell. Like this is this mode of
(19:05):
labor. Well, that that atechnology, a storage technology
introduces a particular mode oflabor. And in this case, I would
argue it's a it's a verygendered mode of labor. It's a
mode of labor that is set up toretrieve to store and retrieve a
particular object.
And that object is informationunderstood as something that is
(19:28):
discreet and particular. So nota bound book. Right? So it's not
a piece of paper bound into avolume. It's a loose piece of
paper, that exists securedtemporarily within a manila
folder within the drawer of afiling cabinet.
Lisa Gitelman (19:45):
Wow. And you use this phrase that I love,
granular certainty, which Ithink, you know, it picks up
Jeff Nunberg's derivation ofinformation 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 sonicely. But now I'm now that I'm
(20:07):
listening to you, I'm hearingyou say that granular certainty
refers both to the discrete bitsof paper contained in the files
contained in the file cabinet,but also to the hands the
unknowing automatic hands of theFalkler.
Craig Robertson (20:22):
Yeah. Yeah. No. I I think it does. Thanks.
Thanks. And thank you. Thanksfor the complimentary granular
certainty, but also thanks forthe nod to Jeff Nunberg as well
because clearly it does it doesdraw on that. And so I was, you
know, I was pretty happy when Icame up with the idea of
granular certainty, because itgot me out of a corner that I
sort of boxed myself into. And Ido make arguments about, as I
(20:45):
said earlier about efficiencyand ideas of efficiency and
productivity and system at thispoint, in the early twentieth
century when the bulk of thisbook, the period this book is
focused on.
But what I like about granularcertainty is it both
acknowledges that argument aboutthe particularity of
information, but ties it also tothe broader ideas of efficiency.
(21:08):
Right? So I'm linking it toefficiency, but I'm not that
interested in arguments about orexploring the work that, you
know, Alfred Chandler has doneand Joanne Yates has done and
other scholars have done to say,oh, you know, we need to
understand this is a moment wheninformation becomes critical to
or central to corporatecapitalism or the development of
managerial capitalism. I'minterested in granular certainty
(21:31):
as a way to think about howefficiency, ideas of efficiency
shaped the understanding andconceptualization of information
is a thing. And therefore, thatties, as you said, Lisa, to the
hands, right, to theparticularity, to the focus, to
the breaking down of things, to,like, sort of their smallest
component parts so that they canbe managed and controlled.
(21:53):
So in this situation, it's themanagement and control of labor
as well as the management andcontrol of information that that
labor is retrieving.
Shannon Mattern (22:02):
So this maybe foreshadows our file five, where
we talk about variousgenealogies or histories of
information.
Craig Robertson (22:09):
Cross referencing, Shannon. We can
cross reference. We're allowedto cross reference.
Shannon Mattern (22:14):
So before we get there, I wanna just rifle a
little bit more through filesfour to see some other
connections that I I wasnoticing. Because in in focusing
on the vertical history ofinformation, you offer us formal
genealogies. You talk about thisreally fantastic world of
precursors to the vertical file,everything from boxes and
spikes, the people would, youknow, that you see at a
restaurant where they take thereceipts and put them on a big
(22:35):
spike, pigeon holes, Shannonfiles, of course, my favorite,
flat files, vertical files, allof which require different
actions again as, like,referring back to my previous
comment about we have to clipthem, we have to attach them
with a big we have to put themon a big u hook, we have to
compress them into a file, whichreminds me of a piece that Lisa
wrote for a collection that Iedited, like, almost a decade
(22:57):
ago about the history of thepaperclip and how that's not
just a mechanical operation.It's actually an ontological
operation too. You'reessentially defining what the
file is and how it fits into alarger whole, a larger larger
system of management, a largerbody of knowledge by performing
certain actions on it, byattaching two papers together,
by stapling them together, byputting them on a hook together.
(23:20):
So it's not just an arbitrarymechanism. There also is kind of
an ontological andepistemological significance
there too.
Lisa Gitelman (23:26):
That's a great point, Shannon, and and it does
speak to so much thatunderwrites Craig's book too.
Just about the different scalesat which we countenance and
therefore construct knowledgeand information. You know, the
paper clip is an incidentalthing. Most people will have
thought of the file folder andthe file cabinet is pretty
incidental. The bullet point,you know, is another the Zoom
(23:47):
window.
I mean, you you know, we knowand we experience information at
all of these different levels.Can we move on to, file five? We
had thought, Craig, that wewanted to get you to talk about
different ways to historicizethis ever present to our current
(24:08):
lives category of information.And you clearly have worked
within or in light of a businesshistory tradition. You mentioned
Joanne Yates in her wonderfulbook, Control Through
Communication, also the work ofAlfred Chandler, the kind of
dean of American businesshistory.
But we wanted to talk aboutother, possibilities for a
(24:29):
genealogy of information. And,Shannon, why don't I ask you a
question? You've workedextensively on libraries. What
does a library history ofinformation look like?
Shannon Mattern (24:38):
That's a really good question. That wasn't
really one I had prepared toanswer today, but there there's
some cross pollination betweenthe library world and the
business world as Craig mentionsin the book that we had the
library bureau, with, MelvilleDewey who clearly saw library
management as something thatcould went beyond the library
world. They were developingtechniques, technologies,
(24:58):
equipment, furnishings, alltypes of things that had a
market that expanded well beyondthe library world. Also drawing
some inspiration fromdevelopments were happening in
the business world intolibraries. That said, this may
be a larger question is if a ifa technology is developed within
with originally a capitalistimpulse or for the purposes of
management, is it possible forit to kind of shed the
(25:21):
ideologies that it was built forand maybe serve different
political end goals?
So if you look at the history ofinformation management in the
library world, particularly inkind of the global development,
the long term aspirations forthe universal library, some of
which have colonialist impulses.You wanna develop a universalist
a universal library because youwanna colonize the entire world.
It's about imperialism. That'skind of the ideological end goal
(25:45):
of these manage application ofmanagement techniques. But then
you also have the people likePaul Atlee, who Craig mentions
in the book, part of the wholedocumentalist internationalist
tradition of the latenineteenth, early twentieth
centuries.
As heavy handed as theirexercises and operations might
have been. The motivation forwhat they were doing was to
create world peace. They thoughtthat by standardizing paper
(26:07):
sizes and transforming all theworld's knowledge into
interchangeable index cards sowe could create essentially a
universal language ofinformation and exchange that
would allow for democratizingknowledge, for democratizing
education, and cultivating worldpeace. Obviously, there's a
again, anytime you wanna imposea universal classification
(26:27):
system, there's an imperialistmotive behind that too. So it
does raise these questions ifcan you take a technology or
technique that was developed fora capitalist or imperialist
enterprise and use it for morebenevolent democratic ends.
Lisa Gitelman (26:44):
Thanks. You know, I had not sort of picked all
that up, but that makes it soundlike a happy story, the history
of information. I I I got alittle concerned at times when
Craig was telling the businesshistory version of this,
obviously connected, that it'sall about some kind of
tautological set of conditionswhere efficiency equals system
equals efficiency equals systemon the interests of managerial
(27:08):
capital as the multinationalcorporations brings to life.
Craig Robertson (27:12):
The perspective that I'm sort of coming from, I
think, is that in all theseexamples that Shannon talked
about, I think this was partlywas your point, Shannon, right,
that these these are being putto different ends. They're all
emerging out of this moment,when an instrumental form of
knowledge is increasingly beingseen as important, right and
(27:33):
critical to the development ofknowledge. And this instrumental
form of knowledge isinformation. So that in that in
that library history, like at amore mundane level than Otley,
and his great projects is thevertical file. In that emerges
in public libraries right at thebeginning of the twentieth
century, which is a newessentially a newspaper clipping
(27:54):
file right in a vertical filecabinet or, and it has newspaper
clippings that has pamphlets andand brochures and, and other
things in it other bits of loosepaper.
But to me, all of them are, andall the technologies around them
are responses to this moment inthe history of information,
(28:15):
which is this moment wheninformation this information
becomes a label for a particularthing that they may be put to
different ends. So in thatsense, I feel like, I don't know
if it's the business history ofinformation, but it's the
efficiency history or the systemhistory of information. Right?
So it's not looking at howinformation is used to improve
(28:37):
productivity, you know, tocelebrate the growth of
corporate capitalism, as youcould argue Chandler does.
Right?
But it's the way in whichinformation is conceptualized.
Lisa Gitelman (28:46):
That makes sense. So it it's it's about the
coherence of information as anobject in a discourse that is a
centralizing discourse, youknow, whether in the vertical
file in the library or in thecentral file of the office.
Craig Robertson (28:58):
Yeah.
Lisa Gitelman (28:59):
So they're they're a a breaking point to
notice would be, I've done alittle bit of work on the
history of Xerox, you know,photocopying. And the central
file in the office starts toerode once you can quickly walk
to the Xerox machine as I didwhen I worked in an archive and
just take a copy of something.So all of a sudden, this the
logic of the central file startsto sort of melt away and people
(29:21):
have their own files again.Right? I used to just you know,
I worked in an archive, and Iwent I would take a Xerox or
something, and I would take ithome at night.
And it was a great way to build,you know, quote, my archive
outside of this centralizinglogic of efficiency and
information.
Shannon Mattern (29:38):
I think efficiency also has different
connotations in differentcontexts. It can be, again, to
produce profit, to maximizeprofit. It can be to enhance
translation. So, again, theyhave their different ideological
ends as well. And, also, if youlook about the history of
information through science, youknow, through classification,
which is rooted again incolonialism, this idea that
we're gonna travel, explore theEarth, collect specimens, and
(29:59):
then label everything.
So maybe colonialism is a is aundercurrent for a lot of these
things, but still there's theefficiency, translation,
whatever the whatever themechanism that allows for the
transfer of information, theeasy access, retrieval. It it
can be put to different kind ofepistemological or
methodological ends.Governments, you know, Craig
(30:20):
mentions John Agar's work in thebook too. So there, the
collection of information forthe social contract of having a
government. I mean, again,that's maybe again about
efficiency, about a particularconception of information, but
it's for a a a differentpolitical end than we might
think of it within businesshistory or the corporation.
Yeah.
Craig Robertson (30:39):
That that's a great clarification, Shannon.
Definitely. Yeah. I mean,efficiency becomes this catchall
term, you know, for manydifferent things. And so I think
the period I'm looking at, Ithink efficiency or when I'm
using efficiency, it really isthat kind of beginning of the
twentieth century when savingtime becomes the defining
problem, right?
Because you can think aboutclassification and sciences and
(31:02):
other things that might be aboutmaking it easier to find
something. But I think whathappens in this, I guess, going
back to Lisa's point, this isthe business history perspective
of it. Maybe it becomes not justabout making it easier to find
something. It's about savingtime. So it gets connected to to
capitalism over and above whereit may manifest in other
(31:23):
histories that you've pointedout, Shannon.
Lisa Gitelman (31:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And, Shannon, you're so
right.
You know, our vision is a littlebit blurred coming from The US
and the kind of the way thatChandlerian perspective has a
lock, and our imaginations insome contexts because elsewhere
a more statist, view ofinformation and efficiency I
think would would would dominateand this, you know, links
(31:46):
obviously to the colonialproject. You know, in in a way
we're just sort of we're we're alittle bit blurred, by our focus
on the comp the corporation.Another, you know, kind of
option to historicizeinformation would be a much
more, signal processing, youknow, a much more technical
account, of signal processingand, you know, information
(32:08):
versus noise and things likethat. And and that might, you
know, be the the pathway wewanna take towards, file six.
And that's our last kind ofgeneral area of of conversation
around, you know, the the socalled paperless office, but
also the kind of end game forfiling and for indexing.
(32:30):
I mean, Craig, you yourselfmentioned that in writing the
book, you came to just do wordsearches, you know, instead of
actually relying on the filesystem that you had so cleverly
devised. Are you seeing are youthinking about an endgame for
filing the end of filingcabinets as well as for files?
Craig Robertson (32:48):
I think that well, yeah, I think the file I'm
one of the arguments I maybe alittle too implicitly make in
the book, right, is that thefiling cabinet to me is a very
twentieth century technology. Iwas almost gonna say the
quintessential, but I'll sayit's just a very twentieth
century technology. I mean, itemerges right at the end of the
1890s. And I think it's, it'spretty much had its day and, you
(33:11):
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 filingcabinets, like literally once a
week, at least when I walkaround here. And now the end of
the semester, I think it's gonnabe its peak peak filing cabinet,
throwing out season.
(33:31):
But I've actually seen less andless of those in recent years
because there's no filecabinets, for people to get rid
of. And so, yeah, I think inthat sense, the filing cabinet
itself, you know, it lingeredhad sort of a a slight nineteen
nineties into the early twothousands afterlife as an icon,
you know, on our on ourcomputers on our on our
(33:53):
desktops. But even that hasdisappeared. And then in terms
of the understanding of thefile, I've noticed when this is
hasn't happened a lot, but it'shappened enough that I've
noticed it when students willcome to my office hours, and
they will, they'll wannaretrieve a document, and they
will download it from GoogleDocs. Right?
(34:14):
Or they'll download it from theemail in front of me. And then
we talk and we go back to it,and they download it again.
Right? And and and becausethere's not this conception of
the file is this thing that isnow moved onto the desktop.
There's not even a conception inwhat I would understand a file
to be.
Right? They're not thinkingabout a file as something on
(34:36):
their computer in a folder, letalone some really complicated
Devon think pro organizer, youknow, hierarchical file
structure.
Shannon Mattern (34:44):
I I was just thinking about the different
applications that particularlygenerations below me are using
and how that the going back towhat we were saying earlier
about how the graphical userinterface in a way shapes or
materializes the particularontology of the file for us in a
mode of working, in a way ofthinking about managing
knowledge. If we think morecapaciously about knowledge,
that includes everything from,like, Instagram post to tweets
(35:06):
and how these have their ownlogic of organization. So what
is, again, the granular? What isthe granular particularity, in
each of those differentplatforms? What's the unit of
knowledge or the unit ofinformation, the datum?
Many cases, chronological. Forexample, the with the Twitter
feed, the the the influx or theinfluence of algorithms and and
(35:29):
reshaping, you know, even beyondour control. Like, the
management of files anymore isnot just a matter of our
volition, our hands, ourfeminine hands kind of, moving
through the tabs, but it'salgorithms. We're partnering
with artificial intelligence tomanage and retrieve our files
anymore. So just how complicatedit is if we think across
multiple platforms and mediamodalities, what the file is and
(35:51):
how it's created, stored,classified, and retrieved, and
preserved, which again, becausewe're relying so much in
corporate platforms anymore,Google has no obligation to
store our files for us.
You know, I remember when GoogleReader went away. Everybody lost
all their bookmarks if theydidn't migrate somewhere else.
So we have so little controlbecause we're so dependent on
(36:12):
proprietary systems. Librariesrelying on corporate kind of
publishers or commercialpublishers to maintain their
databases of journals. If a ifan a ProQuest or an EBSCO
decides to do away with aparticular journal, you lose
access to all those filesbecause it's you don't have a
licensed kind of rental contractfor it anymore.
(36:32):
So so much of our filemanagement has essentially gone
out of our hands because of allthese reliance on different kind
of commercial platforms.
Lisa Gitelman (36:40):
It's a good point. For me, the real
signifier of that as atransition from our very, you
know, kind of twentieth century,intuitive sense of being able to
look it up, when I've heardpeople say search it up.
Shannon Mattern (36:54):
Oh.
Lisa Gitelman (36:55):
You know, just just getting out there into the
algorithmic cloud.
Shannon Mattern (37:00):
I don't know if this is a separate question, but
I wonder if this is a file sixor maybe a files, a file seven
or a file six b. But given theso I've heard some people use
the terms responsibilizationwith the decline of the clerical
class. Universities inparticular, you know, are, in
(37:21):
the grand age of universities,I'm imagining what we see in the
movies is, like, all themasculine professors, the male
professors with their hugeoffices and their personal
assistants. You know, the factthat we have a reshifting of
clerical and administrativelabor in universities.
Enterprise software has does thework of a lot of what formerly a
clerical class would have done.
(37:41):
Now that a lot a lot ofmanagement of files has been
pushed back on and and and touse this kind of awkward term,
individual people to managetheir receipts, to manage their
banking, to do all kinds ofthings that professional filers
would have once done for us. Iwonder if you have any thoughts
about kind of just theexpectation that individual
people are supposed to be filemanagement experts in so many
(38:04):
specialized domains of life thatonce we were able to outsource
or we once had trainedspecialists to do for us?
Craig Robertson (38:11):
I think that, yeah, it's interesting because I
feel there were there was maybewas it ten years ago or so forth
with the argument was it wasinteresting. It wasn't that
people were becoming their ownfile clerks, right. But they
were becoming their ownarchivists, right, or the or the
language was and I think this isinteresting. The language was
that we were, we were having tolearn to curate our photographs
(38:33):
to curate our files, right, butnot to file them. Right, which
this is not obviously a directanswer to your question, Janet's
or comment, right?
That I think so thatresponsibility, as you sort of
pointed out is is been occurringover the last several decades.
But I think it's interestingthat often we're not talked of
(38:54):
as file clerks is is doingfiling, right? We're curating
files or we're organizing filesor we're arranging files, but
we're not actually doing thatsort of highly gendered practice
of being a file clerk.
Lisa Gitelman (39:10):
It's true because the pejorative gender
associations were so deeply heldand felt that they have to be,
you know, kind of stripped outin a sense as we all, you you
know, are now delegated to dothis kind of work. So this is
really returning us to file fouron the labor question. And,
Shannon, you're I think you'rereally sort of pointing to just
how interconnected the laborquestion is with so many other
(39:32):
things. I mean, I think of, youknow, some of the work that I've
done on the PDF format, right,and just the kind of realization
that once you could move aroundthe document in a semi stable
format like that, yes, you wereperforming clerical labor of
some sort, but it also had, youknow, sort of profound
implications for transportation.Right?
There's a way in which, youknow, if you think of the PDF
(39:53):
file, sure, it's ground up paperand ground up ink and ground up
file clerks and ground upsecretaries, but it's ground up
airplanes and ground up trucksand ground up, you know, filing
cabinets and ground upeverything else. We're we're so
completely enmeshed, in theseassemblages.
Shannon Mattern (40:09):
Yeah. And this also extends to I know that,
Craig has mentioned the work ofMarcus Krajewski in here a few
times. So even his more recentbook on the server, again, looks
at the history of Ask Jeeves,the feminized voice of Siri, for
instance. So we have automatedassistants who do our file
retrieval for us in so manycases. So still these issues of
gender and class, just beingable to rely on a servant,
(40:32):
whether it's a human or anautomated version, just
continues this discussion ofgender labor that Craig talks
about in the book.
Lisa Gitelman (40:38):
Super cool. Here's another question. So, the
reason I still have filingcabinets and I have two small
two drawer ones is because mydesk is made out of them.
Craig Robertson (40:47):
Right.
Lisa Gitelman (40:48):
So I can't get rid of them. But one one of
them, the little button, snappedclosed, so it's a locked filing
cabinet filled with files fromtwenty years ago. How do I get
that open?
Craig Robertson (40:59):
I know. I think you've just gotta get the hammer
out. Right?
Shannon Mattern (41:04):
Just to Lisa's point about the fact that some
of us are still reliant on kindof legacy filing cabinets
because they still performnecessary utilitarian functions
as desks or whatever. In my olddepartment, we moved into what
used to be the finance office,which was an open plan office.
So imagine a whole entirefaculty of 22 faculty moving
into an entire big open planoffice where the only spatial
(41:25):
dividers were the literallyhundreds of built in filing
cabinets that were kind of aboutwaist height, maybe three and a
half to four feet high. Itcreated some sense of spatial
partition. Of course, it didn'tdeal with acoustic challenges or
offer any privacy, but there wasmixed feelings about the filing
cabinets.
We just dumped junk into thembecause nobody had files to
(41:46):
store in these thousands oflinear feet of filing cabinets,
but they were also necessarybecause they at least provide
some tiny sense of privacy inthis, you know, increasing
spread of the open the open planoffice. So this is maybe some
interesting kind of legacymoment where it's talking about
the the prior history of filingcabinets and their centrality
and how they form this pivotalrole in the move to a more,
(42:10):
ephemeralized informationeconomy in an open plan office.
Lisa Gitelman (42:14):
Well, and if we're thinking about, you know,
kind of throwback moments, I Iwanted to point to one that I
found fascinating, Craig, in thebook because it picks up not the
history of information and howwe historicize that, but really
the history of knowledge. And,of course, the information
knowledge distinction is onethat we could spend another
couple of hours on, which wewon't. But you mentioned, you
(42:34):
know, out of, law offices inparticular, the way in which
individual files, right, socollections of paper in Manila
folders came to stand for thecase, in question. And this is
very much, you know, the casemethod in law, but it's also the
way so many of us operate asscholars, but how knowledge work
(42:54):
happens. It happens, toparticular cases.
We make the objects that westudy. We make the things that
we know, out of our knowledgepractices. And so even that
history of knowledge has a has astory that goes back to the
history of
Craig Robertson (43:09):
filing. Right. Yes. And, of course, and, you
know, and that's a story that,Cornelia Wiesemann takes even
further back. Right?
And, in her, like,groundbreaking work, on on legal
case files, really, in inGermany.
Lisa Gitelman (43:22):
That was great, Craig. Great, Shannon. Thank
you. Same to
Craig Robertson (43:26):
you. Okay. Well, I just wanna, thank Lisa
and Shannon, for coming alongtoday. I was really, excited
when, Minnesota contacted me andsaid, we'd like to do a podcast
on the book. And I thoughtinstantly, well, who are the two
people that I'd like to talkabout the most with this book?
And it was Shannon and Lisa, andthey agreed. And, I think this
(43:46):
has been a really greatconversation. And so thank you
to Shannon and Lisa, and thankyou to Maggie at Minnesota for
putting this all together. And Ihope you will enjoy it.
Hey. I wanna welcome everybody, to this
discussion of Craig Robertson'sThe Filing Cabinet, A Vertical
History of Information. It's agreat new book from University
of Minnesota Press. I'm LisaGettleman. I'm joined here by
Craig himself as well as ShannonMattern, and we thought we'd
start with just a couple ofquick introductions so you know
who we are and who you'relistening to.
(00:27):
So, Craig, why don't you gofirst?
Craig Robertson (00:29):
Okay. Well, I'm Craig Robertson. I'm an
associate professor of mediastudies at Northeastern
University in Boston. And, yeah,I've just had the filing cabinet
of vertical history ofinformation recently published.
Shannon Mattern (00:42):
And I'm Shannon Mattern. I'm in the department
of anthropology at The NewSchool in New York, but my work
is about I'm a historian andtheorist of media and design,
and I have written booksincluding a couple with the
University of Minnesota aboutlibrary architecture, maps,
urban infrastructures. And I dowork about how information is
materialized in the world. SoCraig and I have a lot of
(01:02):
interest in common.
Lisa Gitelman (01:04):
Great. Yeah. And I'm Lisa Gittleman, as I said. I
teach at NYU in the departmentsof English and media studies.
And I think that Shannon andCraig's work are really in my
wheelhouse too.
I work on, the history ofdocuments, the media history of
knowledge and information. And,I've known Shannon and and Craig
for a long time, and it's adelight to be able to talk about
(01:24):
this new book. So we were gonnastart with a couple of process
questions because they alwaysinterest me so much. Craig, I
wanted to ask you, how did youeven come to write this book in
the first place? How does a bookon the filing cabinet even occur
to someone?
Craig Robertson (01:38):
Well, it seems to occur naturally if one is
researching a history of thepassport. So whether we go back
even further. But, no, this cameout of the research for my book
on the passport. And whilethere's some overlap in terms of
shared interests in paperworkand bureaucracy, it my interest
in the filing cabinet literallycame out of my researching for
(02:02):
the passport. And particularlywhen I was at, National Archives
in College Park, Maryland, and Iwas going through nineteenth
century US diplomaticcorrespondence, right to try and
find things about the passport.
And this had all beenmicrofilmed. It was a microfilm
of bound volumes, right,organized by consular officers.
(02:22):
And there was almost no index.Right? There might be if you
were lucky, there might be analphabetical index by name, of
of sender or receiver, but nosubject index, no nothing.
And so I'm struggling throughthese trying to make sense of
them. And then I hit nineteen osix. That year is always gonna
be etched in my mind. I come tonineteen o six, and all of a
(02:44):
sudden the state department hasintroduced a numerical filing
system. And what that means isthat every passport office or
every consular office around theworld shares the same number for
a passport for passportcorrespondence, And all the
passport specific passport caseshave sub numbers underneath it.
(03:07):
And it's all together in oneplace. Right? So like subject
has trumped chronology. And allof a sudden, my research is made
exponentially easier and theneven easier after 1910, when
they bring in an even morecomplicated decimal based,
filing system. And so I wasvery, you know, I thought this
(03:29):
is amazing.
Like, I hadn't really everstopped to think about the way
in which moving to file thingsthrough a decimal filing system
would make such a hugedifference and, you know, to
avoid or I mean, maybe tointroduce the first of many bad
puns. I kind of filed that awayfor future reference, that idea,
and then came back to it, lateron and did some initial
(03:52):
research, read, Joanne Yates'work on the filing cabinet and a
couple of other bits and pieceson filing systems. And I
discovered that I was not alonein my excitement at the arrival
of the filing systems in earlytwentieth century, United States
and globally. And what I did butwhat I discovered, which I
wasn't quite expecting, was theway in which people explain this
(04:14):
transformation, right, was amove from the bound book to the
filing cabinet. So what happenedwas in my research, I moved from
thinking about the impact offiling systems to the filing
cabinet itself.
So then the book that I ended upwriting became a book that is
much more a history of storagethan a history of
(04:35):
classification. Though I don'twanna lose the librarians and
archivists who are listening tous. There's lots of
classification and indexing inthere, but, but it's sort of
subsumed under a history ofstorage.
Lisa Gitelman (04:48):
Well, it's a great story, Craig. I I have to
share that I had a similar kindof revelation, not with regard
to the history of verticalfiling in the archive when I hit
it, but with the history of thetypewriter. You just reach a
certain annus mirabilis, youknow, just this miracle. All of
a sudden, the handwritingsubsides and the typing,
emerges, and you can readeverything so much faster.
Shannon Mattern (05:10):
Well, we're gonna be organizing our
conversation in in, the a fileformat. So just imagine as we
move on to a different category,we're opening a new opening and
closing a new drawer on Craig'sbook. So file two, in con
consistent with the question atleast just asked about the
process of the book. Given,Craig, that this is a Herculean
(05:33):
effort of archival research, thebook is so beautifully
illustrated with so many justfantastic advertisements and
brochures from your archivalresearch. I can only imagine how
difficult the file managementprocess of writing the book was.
So what if you could talk alittle bit about how you
created, organized, stored,retrieved, and preserved your
own files in producing thisbook?
Craig Robertson (05:54):
Yeah. That was there was something I remember
talking with Matt Kirschenbaumwho when he was writing his his
track changes his book on wordprocessing. And he was saying
how, you know, that justthinking about the literal
process of typing made himreally conscious of that and
hesitant as he worked on hisown. And he worked on that book.
And I had a similar thing when Ibegan the research for this
(06:16):
book.
Because prior to this, I justkind of just use Word documents.
Right? You know, and and and andlittle, 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 organizethings. So I possibly this was
(06:37):
more procrastination to avoidreally getting into into
writing. But I did spend a lotof time trying to figure out and
this was like eight or nineyears ago to try and figure out
how I was going to organize, myarchive.
And I tried all sorts ofdifferent crazy things and then
ended up with this weirdcombination of using the
(06:59):
software called Devon Think Profor some of it, and then
Scrivener as I got into writing.And at that point, honestly, the
Devon Think Pro software wasgreat because at that point, it
was one of the easiest ways toget, OCR, right, to get text
recognition. So as I was takingall these photographs, at when I
(07:19):
went to archives, because Ididn't have a lot of time to
stay at archives, So I wouldtake lots of photos, not too
much of of ads, but also of,documents, bring them home, do
some good text recognition, andput them into, Devon think. And
then I did initially because I Iguess, you know, I am a child of
twentieth century fileorganization. I created folders
(07:41):
and subfolders and organizedeverything within that.
And then I was like, full textsearch. And so it really was
like, so I have this strangestrange archive that I created
where I had these reallydetailed breakdowns and
organisations, using folders andsubfolders, etc, for about the
(08:02):
first sort of half of theproject. And then it's just like
a dump of PDFs, Right? Becausethen it's like, ah, full text,
full text search. It'swonderful.
And, yeah, and so and andorganize it that way. But the
key point, I think, is that itreally made me very, very self
conscious of my own practices,and how they weren't actually,
(08:23):
dare I say it, that efficient.And so I I worked hard on them.
And do you do you use Scriveneror Devinting Pro? Or Shannon, I
just imagine you have someamazingly well organized,
system.
Shannon Mattern (08:36):
Well, I have a whole bunch of systems going on
simultaneously, and I wish therewere a way to reconcile them. If
I get a grant, I'd love to pay aprogrammer to somehow kind of
merge the various systems Ihave. I started off using Devon
ThinkPro, and that made me veryconscious because that seemed to
me that software called for avery granular organization of
pieces of information. So that,for me, made me essentially
(08:58):
perform the action that you'retalking about in the book, take
knowledge and turn it intoinformation, into granular
particular pieces ofinformation. The software seemed
to call for that.
That ultimately, after spendingan entire sabbatical
transferring all my notes anddev 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 withScrivener. But Scrivener also
(09:19):
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 fileorganization and and, it
embodies an epistemology and amode of working too. So software
itself, which you talk about inyour conclusion, does have a way
of of calling our attention tothe way that we, to
(09:42):
denaturalizing naturalized modesof working and making us think
critically about how we organizeour own files because they're
often built on a graphicrepresentation of files in some
way.
Craig Robertson (09:51):
Exactly.
Lisa Gitelman (09:53):
Yeah. No. And and we wanna let let's put a let's
put a a bookmark in this becausewe definitely wanna come back at
the end of our discussion, tothe 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 thisconversation a little bit
(10:14):
beforehand. We thought we shouldhit some interim files here.
So file three, file four, filefive. File three, related to
this conversation we're having,file three is about, storage,
itself, because storage ends upbeing a huge theme in your book,
(10:34):
you know, the idea of verticalstorage, obviously, from the
title, but other, ways as well,the kind of steel case of the
filing cabinet, and other thingsabout it. Maybe, Craig, you
could start us off again. Justjust, you know, how are you
conceptualizing storage inrelation to the filing cabinet?
Craig Robertson (10:53):
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 thinkingabout it as a storage container.
Right.
So I mean, there was, you know,that step didn't come
necessarily as automatically asyou might think. So, you know, I
started to think about that. Andthen it was like, what is a
refrain throughout the book? Isthis argument that will this
(11:16):
claim, right, that storage isnot neutral. And what I really
wanted to do with the book was,you know, provide a really
detailed case study or if youlike, or exploration of that
claim.
And and so part of that was tosay, okay. Well, when we think
about storage, we're thinkingabout to store something
involves making choices ordecisions, and that produces
(11:39):
sets of practices. And I triedto 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.
Right? And to me, these arethese are the ideas that shaped
the storage space that thefiling cabinet, captured, right,
(11:59):
that the filing cabinet,created. And in that, you have
issues that I think are commonacross most sort of storage
spaces, which is concerns aboutenclosure, concerns about
protection, concerns aboutaccumulation. My argument is
that when it comes to the filingcabinet is a storage container.
(12:20):
The response to those concernsabout enclosure, security,
protection, accumulation areshaped by ideas of efficiency
and and system.
And that's what makes this aparticular moment in a long
history of storage and a longhistory of modern storage.
Lisa Gitelman (12:39):
Fascinating. And so so the I mean, the story
about storage that our listenersmay be more familiar with from
recent literatures is thestorage container. Right? So
modularity as a principle ofstorage added to the to the
others, but the one the oneyou're, you know, working on
here really predates that, andforwards a lot of these
principles that also apply.
Craig Robertson (13:01):
Yeah. No. I was there there as I was in
particularly when, I also in thebook talk about closets and
kitchen cabinets in the home asI make an argument about how
these ideas of storage move outof the office. And in those,
when you're looking throughbetter home and gardens and
house beautiful and thesemagazines from the 1920s, odd
pages in there are like lookingat an Ikea catalog, right? Like,
(13:23):
because what you're seeingwhat's happening with storage in
the home in the 1920s and the30s.
And my argument is this comesout of the office, is this
beginning to think aboutmodularity to think about
planned storage, to think reallyabout designing spaces for
particular objects so that theywill fit. And you will know to
go put your piece of paper inthis file folder or put, you
(13:48):
know, the bag of flour in thisplace in the kitchen cabinet.
Shannon Mattern (13:51):
And just another resonance that might
come up in our the end of ourdiscussion about why this is
particularly relevant today is,you know, with more people
working from home, they've hadto compress a workspace, a
childcare center, and alltraditional domestic activities
in one space, which required allnew modes of of of, reorganizing
kind of home materials. Sostorage has been something
(14:12):
that's very front and center andand, pressing for people's
everyday lives, especiallythroughout the pandemic. So I
guess, a continuation from that,file four would be how do we
transform how do we think aboutstorage in relation to labor?
You talked about some of thecentral themes of the book,
including things likepreservation and closure, but
(14:34):
those required human bodiesdoing particular activities in
relationship to the materials offiling. So they're doing things
like clipping, compressing,attaching, pulling, sliding.
In some cases, you showed in theadvertisements, like, doing
handstands on the filing cabinetthemselves to demonstrate how
strong they are, and these raisequestions of gender, race, and
(14:55):
class. So why don't you talk abit about the activities, the
labor activities involved in afiling and how they essentially
call it for particular filingsubjects?
Craig Robertson (15:04):
Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's thanks for that
question. There's a there's alot in there. You picked a lot
in that file.
When you and you're sorry. Inyour question there, Shannon,
you you used clipping andgrabbing and got grasping and
holding and and I think thatspeaks to one of the sort of
most important points I want tomake about about the use of the
(15:25):
filing cabinet and the type ofwork that the filing cabinet
encourages, right, the type oflabor that it shapes. And that
is this idea of informationbeing this discrete object that
can be held. Right? So again, asI as I hopefully sort of make
clear in the book, and I wannamake clear now I'm not saying
(15:46):
that the filing cabinet inventedthis idea of information as a
discrete or particular object.
But what I am arguing is that itgave it a visibility. Right. And
again, perhaps foreshadowingfuture files that further along
in our conversation, you know,obviously, we still talk about
files and folders and and as weinteract in a digital
(16:08):
information environment. But sowhat I'm interested in with with
filing as a mode of labor isthat, first of all, it's
understood to be a mode of laborthat involves the handling of
information, that it involvesthe handling of paper. It
involves the handling ofinformation, such that it is
understood to be a way ofworking with information that
(16:32):
doesn't require thought.
And this thing gets paired withgendered understandings of
labour. So we all of a suddenhave the ideal file clerk being
a woman, right, and being ayoung woman, ideally, as I talk
about in the book, also being awhite woman, a middle class
woman. But the key thing I justwant to talk about at the moment
(16:55):
is, is gender, right? And sofiling this way of interacting
with information becomes agendering practice, right? It
becomes a way of not workingwith knowledge, right, not
having to think, but workinginstead, with this new thing
that is called information.
This sort of instrumental formof knowledge, Right? And
(17:18):
knowledge, not like knowledgethat doesn't require a Noah or a
subject in that sense. So is oneof the, sort of a common phrase
in filing advertisements was theidea of like you a stranger to
the file can come and find thedocument instantly. You don't
need to not understand anythingabout the office. You don't need
to understand anything about thecontents.
(17:40):
You just need to have a basicgrasp of the alphabet and be
able to read and and look at atab and grab a file, which is
understood to be a discretepiece of information. And I
think that's captured mosteffectively in the way in which
filing equipment companiesadvertised the tabs and folders,
(18:01):
right in filing cabinets. Sothey would generally do that by
using an open drawer of a filingcabinet, sort of with a close-up
image of the file drawer withits tabs and folders. And they
would generally be a file clerkstanding there. But because they
were focusing on the draweritself, really all that you saw
of the file clerk were thesedisembodied hands.
(18:24):
Right? And they were gendered,just that they were gendered
hands, but they weredisembodied. So they're almost
always women's hands. And sowhat I found fascinating about
that in showing how it sort ofmodeling how a filing cabinet
worked, these advertisementsalso modeled the ideal mode of
labor. Right?
(18:44):
The ideal mode of labor that wasbeing called filing. And that
mode of labor was one that didnot require thought. Right?
Because you had thesedisembodied hands. It just
required the ability to graspand to hold and to pull and
retrieve and so forth.
I guess that sort of links backto what we were saying earlier
in some ways about storage aswell. Like this is this mode of
(19:05):
labor. Well, that that atechnology, a storage technology
introduces a particular mode oflabor. And in this case, I would
argue it's a it's a verygendered mode of labor. It's a
mode of labor that is set up toretrieve to store and retrieve a
particular object.
And that object is informationunderstood as something that is
(19:28):
discreet and particular. So nota bound book. Right? So it's not
a piece of paper bound into avolume. It's a loose piece of
paper, that exists securedtemporarily within a manila
folder within the drawer of afiling cabinet.
Lisa Gitelman (19:45):
Wow. And you use this phrase that I love,
granular certainty, which Ithink, you know, it picks up
Jeff Nunberg's derivation ofinformation 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 sonicely. But now I'm now that I'm
(20:07):
listening to you, I'm hearingyou say that granular certainty
refers both to the discrete bitsof paper contained in the files
contained in the file cabinet,but also to the hands the
unknowing automatic hands of theFalkler.
Craig Robertson (20:22):
Yeah. Yeah. No. I I think it does. Thanks.
Thanks. And thank you. Thanksfor the complimentary granular
certainty, but also thanks forthe nod to Jeff Nunberg as well
because clearly it does it doesdraw on that. And so I was, you
know, I was pretty happy when Icame up with the idea of
granular certainty, because itgot me out of a corner that I
sort of boxed myself into. And Ido make arguments about, as I
(20:45):
said earlier about efficiencyand ideas of efficiency and
productivity and system at thispoint, in the early twentieth
century when the bulk of thisbook, the period this book is
focused on.
But what I like about granularcertainty is it both
acknowledges that argument aboutthe particularity of
information, but ties it also tothe broader ideas of efficiency.
(21:08):
Right? So I'm linking it toefficiency, but I'm not that
interested in arguments about orexploring the work that, you
know, Alfred Chandler has doneand Joanne Yates has done and
other scholars have done to say,oh, you know, we need to
understand this is a moment wheninformation becomes critical to
or central to corporatecapitalism or the development of
managerial capitalism. I'minterested in granular certainty
(21:31):
as a way to think about howefficiency, ideas of efficiency
shaped the understanding andconceptualization of information
is a thing. And therefore, thatties, as you said, Lisa, to the
hands, right, to theparticularity, to the focus, to
the breaking down of things, to,like, sort of their smallest
component parts so that they canbe managed and controlled.
(21:53):
So in this situation, it's themanagement and control of labor
as well as the management andcontrol of information that that
labor is retrieving.
Shannon Mattern (22:02):
So this maybe foreshadows our file five, where
we talk about variousgenealogies or histories of
information.
Craig Robertson (22:09):
Cross referencing, Shannon. We can
cross reference. We're allowedto cross reference.
Shannon Mattern (22:14):
So before we get there, I wanna just rifle a
little bit more through filesfour to see some other
connections that I I wasnoticing. Because in in focusing
on the vertical history ofinformation, you offer us formal
genealogies. You talk about thisreally fantastic world of
precursors to the vertical file,everything from boxes and
spikes, the people would, youknow, that you see at a
restaurant where they take thereceipts and put them on a big
(22:35):
spike, pigeon holes, Shannonfiles, of course, my favorite,
flat files, vertical files, allof which require different
actions again as, like,referring back to my previous
comment about we have to clipthem, we have to attach them
with a big we have to put themon a big u hook, we have to
compress them into a file, whichreminds me of a piece that Lisa
wrote for a collection that Iedited, like, almost a decade
(22:57):
ago about the history of thepaperclip and how that's not
just a mechanical operation.It's actually an ontological
operation too. You'reessentially defining what the
file is and how it fits into alarger whole, a larger larger
system of management, a largerbody of knowledge by performing
certain actions on it, byattaching two papers together,
by stapling them together, byputting them on a hook together.
(23:20):
So it's not just an arbitrarymechanism. There also is kind of
an ontological andepistemological significance
there too.
Lisa Gitelman (23:26):
That's a great point, Shannon, and and it does
speak to so much thatunderwrites Craig's book too.
Just about the different scalesat which we countenance and
therefore construct knowledgeand information. You know, the
paper clip is an incidentalthing. Most people will have
thought of the file folder andthe file cabinet is pretty
incidental. The bullet point,you know, is another the Zoom
(23:47):
window.
I mean, you you know, we knowand we experience information at
all of these different levels.Can we move on to, file five? We
had thought, Craig, that wewanted to get you to talk about
different ways to historicizethis ever present to our current
(24:08):
lives category of information.And you clearly have worked
within or in light of a businesshistory tradition. You mentioned
Joanne Yates in her wonderfulbook, Control Through
Communication, also the work ofAlfred Chandler, the kind of
dean of American businesshistory.
But we wanted to talk aboutother, possibilities for a
(24:29):
genealogy of information. And,Shannon, why don't I ask you a
question? You've workedextensively on libraries. What
does a library history ofinformation look like?
Shannon Mattern (24:38):
That's a really good question. That wasn't
really one I had prepared toanswer today, but there there's
some cross pollination betweenthe library world and the
business world as Craig mentionsin the book that we had the
library bureau, with, MelvilleDewey who clearly saw library
management as something thatcould went beyond the library
world. They were developingtechniques, technologies,
(24:58):
equipment, furnishings, alltypes of things that had a
market that expanded well beyondthe library world. Also drawing
some inspiration fromdevelopments were happening in
the business world intolibraries. That said, this may
be a larger question is if a ifa technology is developed within
with originally a capitalistimpulse or for the purposes of
management, is it possible forit to kind of shed the
(25:21):
ideologies that it was built forand maybe serve different
political end goals?
So if you look at the history ofinformation management in the
library world, particularly inkind of the global development,
the long term aspirations forthe universal library, some of
which have colonialist impulses.You wanna develop a universalist
a universal library because youwanna colonize the entire world.
It's about imperialism. That'skind of the ideological end goal
(25:45):
of these manage application ofmanagement techniques. But then
you also have the people likePaul Atlee, who Craig mentions
in the book, part of the wholedocumentalist internationalist
tradition of the latenineteenth, early twentieth
centuries.
As heavy handed as theirexercises and operations might
have been. The motivation forwhat they were doing was to
create world peace. They thoughtthat by standardizing paper
(26:07):
sizes and transforming all theworld's knowledge into
interchangeable index cards sowe could create essentially a
universal language ofinformation and exchange that
would allow for democratizingknowledge, for democratizing
education, and cultivating worldpeace. Obviously, there's a
again, anytime you wanna imposea universal classification
(26:27):
system, there's an imperialistmotive behind that too. So it
does raise these questions ifcan you take a technology or
technique that was developed fora capitalist or imperialist
enterprise and use it for morebenevolent democratic ends.
Lisa Gitelman (26:44):
Thanks. You know, I had not sort of picked all
that up, but that makes it soundlike a happy story, the history
of information. I I I got alittle concerned at times when
Craig was telling the businesshistory version of this,
obviously connected, that it'sall about some kind of
tautological set of conditionswhere efficiency equals system
equals efficiency equals systemon the interests of managerial
(27:08):
capital as the multinationalcorporations brings to life.
Craig Robertson (27:12):
The perspective that I'm sort of coming from, I
think, is that in all theseexamples that Shannon talked
about, I think this was partlywas your point, Shannon, right,
that these these are being putto different ends. They're all
emerging out of this moment,when an instrumental form of
knowledge is increasingly beingseen as important, right and
(27:33):
critical to the development ofknowledge. And this instrumental
form of knowledge isinformation. So that in that in
that library history, like at amore mundane level than Otley,
and his great projects is thevertical file. In that emerges
in public libraries right at thebeginning of the twentieth
century, which is a newessentially a newspaper clipping
(27:54):
file right in a vertical filecabinet or, and it has newspaper
clippings that has pamphlets andand brochures and, and other
things in it other bits of loosepaper.
But to me, all of them are, andall the technologies around them
are responses to this moment inthe history of information,
(28:15):
which is this moment wheninformation this information
becomes a label for a particularthing that they may be put to
different ends. So in thatsense, I feel like, I don't know
if it's the business history ofinformation, but it's the
efficiency history or the systemhistory of information. Right?
So it's not looking at howinformation is used to improve
(28:37):
productivity, you know, tocelebrate the growth of
corporate capitalism, as youcould argue Chandler does.
Right?
But it's the way in whichinformation is conceptualized.
Lisa Gitelman (28:46):
That makes sense. So it it's it's about the
coherence of information as anobject in a discourse that is a
centralizing discourse, youknow, whether in the vertical
file in the library or in thecentral file of the office.
Craig Robertson (28:58):
Yeah.
Lisa Gitelman (28:59):
So they're they're a a breaking point to
notice would be, I've done alittle bit of work on the
history of Xerox, you know,photocopying. And the central
file in the office starts toerode once you can quickly walk
to the Xerox machine as I didwhen I worked in an archive and
just take a copy of something.So all of a sudden, this the
logic of the central file startsto sort of melt away and people
(29:21):
have their own files again.Right? I used to just you know,
I worked in an archive, and Iwent I would take a Xerox or
something, and I would take ithome at night.
And it was a great way to build,you know, quote, my archive
outside of this centralizinglogic of efficiency and
information.
Shannon Mattern (29:38):
I think efficiency also has different
connotations in differentcontexts. It can be, again, to
produce profit, to maximizeprofit. It can be to enhance
translation. So, again, theyhave their different ideological
ends as well. And, also, if youlook about the history of
information through science, youknow, through classification,
which is rooted again incolonialism, this idea that
we're gonna travel, explore theEarth, collect specimens, and
(29:59):
then label everything.
So maybe colonialism is a is aundercurrent for a lot of these
things, but still there's theefficiency, translation,
whatever the whatever themechanism that allows for the
transfer of information, theeasy access, retrieval. It it
can be put to different kind ofepistemological or
methodological ends.Governments, you know, Craig
(30:20):
mentions John Agar's work in thebook too. So there, the
collection of information forthe social contract of having a
government. I mean, again,that's maybe again about
efficiency, about a particularconception of information, but
it's for a a a differentpolitical end than we might
think of it within businesshistory or the corporation.
Yeah.
Craig Robertson (30:39):
That that's a great clarification, Shannon.
Definitely. Yeah. I mean,efficiency becomes this catchall
term, you know, for manydifferent things. And so I think
the period I'm looking at, Ithink efficiency or when I'm
using efficiency, it really isthat kind of beginning of the
twentieth century when savingtime becomes the defining
problem, right?
Because you can think aboutclassification and sciences and
(31:02):
other things that might be aboutmaking it easier to find
something. But I think whathappens in this, I guess, going
back to Lisa's point, this isthe business history perspective
of it. Maybe it becomes not justabout making it easier to find
something. It's about savingtime. So it gets connected to to
capitalism over and above whereit may manifest in other
(31:23):
histories that you've pointedout, Shannon.
Lisa Gitelman (31:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And, Shannon, you're so
right.
You know, our vision is a littlebit blurred coming from The US
and the kind of the way thatChandlerian perspective has a
lock, and our imaginations insome contexts because elsewhere
a more statist, view ofinformation and efficiency I
think would would would dominateand this, you know, links
(31:46):
obviously to the colonialproject. You know, in in a way
we're just sort of we're we're alittle bit blurred, by our focus
on the comp the corporation.Another, you know, kind of
option to historicizeinformation would be a much
more, signal processing, youknow, a much more technical
account, of signal processingand, you know, information
(32:08):
versus noise and things likethat. And and that might, you
know, be the the pathway wewanna take towards, file six.
And that's our last kind ofgeneral area of of conversation
around, you know, the the socalled paperless office, but
also the kind of end game forfiling and for indexing.
(32:30):
I mean, Craig, you yourselfmentioned that in writing the
book, you came to just do wordsearches, you know, instead of
actually relying on the filesystem that you had so cleverly
devised. Are you seeing are youthinking about an endgame for
filing the end of filingcabinets as well as for files?
Craig Robertson (32:48):
I think that well, yeah, I think the file I'm
one of the arguments I maybe alittle too implicitly make in
the book, right, is that thefiling cabinet to me is a very
twentieth century technology. Iwas almost gonna say the
quintessential, but I'll sayit's just a very twentieth
century technology. I mean, itemerges right at the end of the
1890s. And I think it's, it'spretty much had its day and, you
(33:11):
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 filingcabinets, like literally once a
week, at least when I walkaround here. And now the end of
the semester, I think it's gonnabe its peak peak filing cabinet,
throwing out season.
(33:31):
But I've actually seen less andless of those in recent years
because there's no filecabinets, for people to get rid
of. And so, yeah, I think inthat sense, the filing cabinet
itself, you know, it lingeredhad sort of a a slight nineteen
nineties into the early twothousands afterlife as an icon,
you know, on our on ourcomputers on our on our
(33:53):
desktops. But even that hasdisappeared. And then in terms
of the understanding of thefile, I've noticed when this is
hasn't happened a lot, but it'shappened enough that I've
noticed it when students willcome to my office hours, and
they will, they'll wannaretrieve a document, and they
will download it from GoogleDocs. Right?
(34:14):
Or they'll download it from theemail in front of me. And then
we talk and we go back to it,and they download it again.
Right? And and and becausethere's not this conception of
the file is this thing that isnow moved onto the desktop.
There's not even a conception inwhat I would understand a file
to be.
Right? They're not thinkingabout a file as something on
(34:36):
their computer in a folder, letalone some really complicated
Devon think pro organizer, youknow, hierarchical file
structure.
Shannon Mattern (34:44):
I I was just thinking about the different
applications that particularlygenerations below me are using
and how that the going back towhat we were saying earlier
about how the graphical userinterface in a way shapes or
materializes the particularontology of the file for us in a
mode of working, in a way ofthinking about managing
knowledge. If we think morecapaciously about knowledge,
that includes everything from,like, Instagram post to tweets
(35:06):
and how these have their ownlogic of organization. So what
is, again, the granular? What isthe granular particularity, in
each of those differentplatforms? What's the unit of
knowledge or the unit ofinformation, the datum?
Many cases, chronological. Forexample, the with the Twitter
feed, the the the influx or theinfluence of algorithms and and
(35:29):
reshaping, you know, even beyondour control. Like, the
management of files anymore isnot just a matter of our
volition, our hands, ourfeminine hands kind of, moving
through the tabs, but it'salgorithms. We're partnering
with artificial intelligence tomanage and retrieve our files
anymore. So just how complicatedit is if we think across
multiple platforms and mediamodalities, what the file is and
(35:51):
how it's created, stored,classified, and retrieved, and
preserved, which again, becausewe're relying so much in
corporate platforms anymore,Google has no obligation to
store our files for us.
You know, I remember when GoogleReader went away. Everybody lost
all their bookmarks if theydidn't migrate somewhere else.
So we have so little controlbecause we're so dependent on
(36:12):
proprietary systems. Librariesrelying on corporate kind of
publishers or commercialpublishers to maintain their
databases of journals. If a ifan a ProQuest or an EBSCO
decides to do away with aparticular journal, you lose
access to all those filesbecause it's you don't have a
licensed kind of rental contractfor it anymore.
(36:32):
So so much of our filemanagement has essentially gone
out of our hands because of allthese reliance on different kind
of commercial platforms.
Lisa Gitelman (36:40):
It's a good point. For me, the real
signifier of that as atransition from our very, you
know, kind of twentieth century,intuitive sense of being able to
look it up, when I've heardpeople say search it up.
Shannon Mattern (36:54):
Oh.
Lisa Gitelman (36:55):
You know, just just getting out there into the
algorithmic cloud.
Shannon Mattern (37:00):
I don't know if this is a separate question, but
I wonder if this is a file sixor maybe a files, a file seven
or a file six b. But given theso I've heard some people use
the terms responsibilizationwith the decline of the clerical
class. Universities inparticular, you know, are, in
(37:21):
the grand age of universities,I'm imagining what we see in the
movies is, like, all themasculine professors, the male
professors with their hugeoffices and their personal
assistants. You know, the factthat we have a reshifting of
clerical and administrativelabor in universities.
Enterprise software has does thework of a lot of what formerly a
clerical class would have done.
(37:41):
Now that a lot a lot ofmanagement of files has been
pushed back on and and and touse this kind of awkward term,
individual people to managetheir receipts, to manage their
banking, to do all kinds ofthings that professional filers
would have once done for us. Iwonder if you have any thoughts
about kind of just theexpectation that individual
people are supposed to be filemanagement experts in so many
(38:04):
specialized domains of life thatonce we were able to outsource
or we once had trainedspecialists to do for us?
Craig Robertson (38:11):
I think that, yeah, it's interesting because I
feel there were there was maybewas it ten years ago or so forth
with the argument was it wasinteresting. It wasn't that
people were becoming their ownfile clerks, right. But they
were becoming their ownarchivists, right, or the or the
language was and I think this isinteresting. The language was
that we were, we were having tolearn to curate our photographs
(38:33):
to curate our files, right, butnot to file them. Right, which
this is not obviously a directanswer to your question, Janet's
or comment, right?
That I think so thatresponsibility, as you sort of
pointed out is is been occurringover the last several decades.
But I think it's interestingthat often we're not talked of
(38:54):
as file clerks is is doingfiling, right? We're curating
files or we're organizing filesor we're arranging files, but
we're not actually doing thatsort of highly gendered practice
of being a file clerk.
Lisa Gitelman (39:10):
It's true because the pejorative gender
associations were so deeply heldand felt that they have to be,
you know, kind of stripped outin a sense as we all, you you
know, are now delegated to dothis kind of work. So this is
really returning us to file fouron the labor question. And,
Shannon, you're I think you'rereally sort of pointing to just
how interconnected the laborquestion is with so many other
(39:32):
things. I mean, I think of, youknow, some of the work that I've
done on the PDF format, right,and just the kind of realization
that once you could move aroundthe document in a semi stable
format like that, yes, you wereperforming clerical labor of
some sort, but it also had, youknow, sort of profound
implications for transportation.Right?
There's a way in which, youknow, if you think of the PDF
(39:53):
file, sure, it's ground up paperand ground up ink and ground up
file clerks and ground upsecretaries, but it's ground up
airplanes and ground up trucksand ground up, you know, filing
cabinets and ground upeverything else. We're we're so
completely enmeshed, in theseassemblages.
Shannon Mattern (40:09):
Yeah. And this also extends to I know that,
Craig has mentioned the work ofMarcus Krajewski in here a few
times. So even his more recentbook on the server, again, looks
at the history of Ask Jeeves,the feminized voice of Siri, for
instance. So we have automatedassistants who do our file
retrieval for us in so manycases. So still these issues of
gender and class, just beingable to rely on a servant,
(40:32):
whether it's a human or anautomated version, just
continues this discussion ofgender labor that Craig talks
about in the book.
Lisa Gitelman (40:38):
Super cool. Here's another question. So, the
reason I still have filingcabinets and I have two small
two drawer ones is because mydesk is made out of them.
Craig Robertson (40:47):
Right.
Lisa Gitelman (40:48):
So I can't get rid of them. But one one of
them, the little button, snappedclosed, so it's a locked filing
cabinet filled with files fromtwenty years ago. How do I get
that open?
Craig Robertson (40:59):
I know. I think you've just gotta get the hammer
out. Right?
Shannon Mattern (41:04):
Just to Lisa's point about the fact that some
of us are still reliant on kindof legacy filing cabinets
because they still performnecessary utilitarian functions
as desks or whatever. In my olddepartment, we moved into what
used to be the finance office,which was an open plan office.
So imagine a whole entirefaculty of 22 faculty moving
into an entire big open planoffice where the only spatial
(41:25):
dividers were the literallyhundreds of built in filing
cabinets that were kind of aboutwaist height, maybe three and a
half to four feet high. Itcreated some sense of spatial
partition. Of course, it didn'tdeal with acoustic challenges or
offer any privacy, but there wasmixed feelings about the filing
cabinets.
We just dumped junk into thembecause nobody had files to
(41:46):
store in these thousands oflinear feet of filing cabinets,
but they were also necessarybecause they at least provide
some tiny sense of privacy inthis, you know, increasing
spread of the open the open planoffice. So this is maybe some
interesting kind of legacymoment where it's talking about
the the prior history of filingcabinets and their centrality
and how they form this pivotalrole in the move to a more,
(42:10):
ephemeralized informationeconomy in an open plan office.
Lisa Gitelman (42:14):
Well, and if we're thinking about, you know,
kind of throwback moments, I Iwanted to point to one that I
found fascinating, Craig, in thebook because it picks up not the
history of information and howwe historicize that, but really
the history of knowledge. And,of course, the information
knowledge distinction is onethat we could spend another
couple of hours on, which wewon't. But you mentioned, you
(42:34):
know, out of, law offices inparticular, the way in which
individual files, right, socollections of paper in Manila
folders came to stand for thecase, in question. And this is
very much, you know, the casemethod in law, but it's also the
way so many of us operate asscholars, but how knowledge work
(42:54):
happens. It happens, toparticular cases.
We make the objects that westudy. We make the things that
we know, out of our knowledgepractices. And so even that
history of knowledge has a has astory that goes back to the
history of
Craig Robertson (43:09):
filing. Right. Yes. And, of course, and, you
know, and that's a story that,Cornelia Wiesemann takes even
further back. Right?
And, in her, like,groundbreaking work, on on legal
case files, really, in inGermany.
Lisa Gitelman (43:22):
That was great, Craig. Great, Shannon. Thank
you. Same to
Craig Robertson (43:26):
you. Okay. Well, I just wanna, thank Lisa
and Shannon, for coming alongtoday. I was really, excited
when, Minnesota contacted me andsaid, we'd like to do a podcast
on the book. And I thoughtinstantly, well, who are the two
people that I'd like to talkabout the most with this book?
And it was Shannon and Lisa, andthey agreed. And, I think this
(43:46):
has been a really greatconversation. And so thank you
to Shannon and Lisa, and thankyou to Maggie at Minnesota for
putting this all together. And Ihope you will enjoy it.
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