Author: Craig Robertson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296372X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.
The Filing Cabinet
Author: Craig Robertson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296372X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296372X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.
The Filing Department
Author: J. Arthur Cramer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Banks and banking
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Banks and banking
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
Filing & Office Management
State Department -- File Survey
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Government Operations. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Personnel records
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
Investigates allegations of poor security in the State Dept Foreign Service personnel file office.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Personnel records
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
Investigates allegations of poor security in the State Dept Foreign Service personnel file office.
State Department--file Survey
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Governmental Operations
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
War Department Correspondence File
Author: United States. War Department
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classification
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classification
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Book Description
State Department--file Survey ...
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Government Operations
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
State Department--file Survey
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Government Operations
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 120
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 120
Book Description
War Department Correspondence File (abridged Ed.) for the Use of the United States Army in the Field
Author: United States. War Department
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classification, Decimal
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classification, Decimal
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description