The Filing Cabinet: How information became a "thing"

University of Minnesota Press

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