IS 291B W26 Week 2 Reading Notes

These are my reading notes from taking Histories of the Database with Prof. Miriam Posner in the Information Studies Department at UCLA.

Robertson, Craig. The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (selections). University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Notes

Summary

• In this book Robertson documents the history of the filing cabinet as a history of information. Robertson argues that the filing cabinet is important because it stores documents, information, and plays an important role in the storing and retrieving of information. While no longer in use it was critical to the expansion of information, government, and capitalism. Robertson analyzes the affordances of the filing cabinet by exploring the relationship between power and epistemology

Introduction

• The design of the filing cabinet reflects the seeming banality of the object, it’s ubiquotous and understated.
• Filing systems are important but we also need to pay attention to where files were stored. The filing cabinet was critical infrastructure of the 20th century for government and capitalism
• Main arguments critical to the analysis
  • Filing cabinet allows us to understand an important period in the genealogy of information
  • Filing cabinet is a example of the material history of efficiency
• Verticality and hiearchy is important, the vertical filing cabinet shows how systems are conceptualizd vertically and enacted through a disciplined female body, secretary.
• Filing cabinet was invented in the united states in the 1890s and became a marker of modernity
• The filing cabinet emerges in an important moment where information is separated from knowledge and instrumentalized, granted authority, and controlled
• surprised that containers to store index cards predates filing cabinets
• Advertisements from the beginning of filing cabinets reflect the gendered divison os labor in the office between manual work and mental work. They also reflect a kind of corporate masculinity
• Filing
  • The filing cabinet is not a static object but is in operation. Filing is an action that is a material enagement between the person and the thing.

Questions

• How can we think about the materiality of databases?

Quotes

• “Could capitalism, surveillance, and governance have developed in the twentieth century without filing cabinets? Of course, but only if there had been another way to store and circulate paper efficiently; if that had been the case, that technology would be the object of this book. This book focuses on the filing cabinet because it was critical to the infrastructure of twentieth-century government and capitalism; it shares with most infrastructure the fact that, embedded as it is in everyday practice, it is rarely considered worthy of comment, and the labor associated with it is minimized or ignored.4” (Robertson, 2021, p. 6)
• “Specifically, I argue that distinctive concepts of storage, filing, information, and efficiency get activated in certain institutional settings to establish social dynamics and relationships, especially those of gender and labor.” (Robertson, 2021, p. 6)
• “An investment in particularization produced “system” as a technique to achieve efficiency. Specifically, the vertical filing cabinet shows how system—as it was conceptualized through scientific management, manifested through a vertical predisposition (cabinet and skyscraper), and enacted through a disciplined female body (employed in a feminized clerical job)—made paper and information functional in the twentiethcentury office.” (Robertson, 2021, p. 7)
• “From these perspectives, the discussion in this book gives historical context to current debates over big data. Nick Couldry summarizes big data as “a general project of social re-construction (and, in a sense, reductionism) … driven by huge corporate and governmental resources, and focussed on the re-gearing of social order so as to better serve capital’s drive to generate economic value from data.”8” (Robertson, 2021, p. 7)
• “That is, papers filed vertically are accessible, compact, and sanitary” (advocates believed the last of these characteristics was critical to the health of an efficient worker).11” (Robertson, 2021, p. 9)
• “As the response to the problem of storing paper and information, the filing cabinet emphasizes distinctive material affordances and economic and cultural priorities. These include efficiency, exploitation of gendered labor, anxiety over information loss, and what I call granular certainty, the drive to break more and more of life and its everyday routines into discrete, observable, and manageable parts.” (Robertson, 2021, p. 6)
• “This drive is evident in the immediate context in which the filing cabinet emerged: the project of scientific management, the manufacture of interchangeable parts, occupational specialization and professionalization, and the logic of bureaucracy as described by Max Weber, who emphasized clearly defined domains of authority and the benefits of interchangeable staff while briefly noting the importance of the file.5 Significantly, these affordances and power dynamics continue to exist in the “files,” “folders,” and “tabs” (and “desktops”) people use today to interact with digital information and data.” (Robertson, 2021, p. 6)
• “Critically, it illustrates the moment in which information gained an identity separate from knowledge, an instrumental identity critical to its accessibility. In its separation from knowledge, information was granted authority based on a set of ideas, practices, and institutional supports that limited interpretation; in contrast, a person, a “knower,” underwrites the authority of knowledge.7 T” (Robertson, 2021, p. 6)
• “Shaw-Walker’s advertisements constructed a series of physical encounters between male and female bodies and the company’s filing cabinets to illustrate different aspects of the “essentials of office equipment”: strength, rigidity, easy operation, noiselessness, economy of floor space, maximum capacity, and good design.” (Robertson, 2021, p. 14)
• “The “Built Like a Skyscraper” campaign was not subtle. It does not take much for twenty-first century scholars armed with theories of gender representation to argue that the brief exercise routine seen in the advertisements reflected the anxiety men felt about the arrival of women clerical workers in offices, particularly those men who also worked as clerks. The phallic skyscraper, the unsheathed tip of the Woolworth Building, the rigid and erect athletic male body—all sought to make explicit the masculinity of the men who worked in offices; such masculinity was not to be questioned, including that of the men at higher levels in the office hierarchy, who “thought” their way through the day. The image the campaign used to demonstrate “easy operation” of the filing cabinet illustrated the gendered division between manual work and mental work.” (Robertson, 2021, p. 15)
• “Shannon Mattern’s concept of “intellectual furnishings” succinctly captures the stakes involved in this research. Mattern uses the concept to connect the histories of technologies such as bookshelves, desks, card catalogs, and server racks. She argues: “I recognize these furnishings as much more than utilitarian equipment; instead, they scaffold our media technologies in particular ways, inform the way human bodies relate to those media in particular ways, and embody knowledge in particular ways. They render complex intellectual and political ideas material and empirical.”22” (Robertson, 2021, p. 17)
• “To assert that technologies “embody knowledge” and “inform” the way bodies interact with them is to make an argument about the materiality of technology.23 Materiality offers the potential to move away from debates about technological determinism, a label applied to arguments that seem to suggest technology is the singular cause of social change. In contrast to the limitations a critique of technological determinism introduces, materialist theories of technology at their most useful offer a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and society.24 Such theories become useful when they explicitly acknowledge the intersection of power dynamics and technology. This approach argues that materialism should “not dismiss questions of human agency, of meaning, or of interpretation, but must stress that the physicality of media plays a part in defining the limits and possibilities in which all of these come to matter and make sense.”25” (Robertson, 2021, p. 17)
• “My aim in this book is not to make the filing cabinet the origin of change; I do not claim that the filing cabinet invented a modern conception of information or that it invented efficiency. I do argue, however, that the filing cabinet provides an important way to understand how information would become the defining aspect of an “age” and “society”; it gives historical context to an important phase in the ascendancy of information.” (Robertson, 2021, p. 19)

Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (selections). Harvard University Press, 2018.

Notes

Summary

• In this book rosenthal seeks to situate the modern business practices and accounting methods within the long history of plantations and slavery in the united states. Many of the modern practices for calculation that are so core to capitalism initially developed in order to efficiently track and extract labor form human cargo in the american south and west indies.
• Rosenthal argues that slavery is central to understanding the historical emergence of capitalism

Introduction

• Scientific agriculture or what was called book farming were a variety of practices that plantation owners would use to do record keeping and numerical analysis of their plantations. they also would create possible scenarios and projections to set target, make comparisons, and make benchmarks.
• Control is at the heart of modern accounting practice and slavery functioned as the laboratory for the development of accounting practices
• In the data we see what the planters wanted us to see, careful meticilous calculation to support the plantation enterprise but we also see in the margins the resistance and excess of Black people who were denied their humanity, made into data, and treated as cargo
• The author argues that the emphasis of Taylor and taylorism in modern histories of management is arbitrary, his actual efficacy and influence is open to debate.and most histories never touch on slavery. but taylor
• She argues that plantation practices predated taylorism and time motion studies

Plantation business practices and strategies

• plantation hiearchies as multidivisoinal form
• standardization of accounts that enabled separation of ownership and management
• spread of productivity analysis
• refinement of valuation practices, specfifically appreciation and depreciation

Forms of Labor

• paper played an important role in record keeping and in the early 19th century there were standardized journals and preprinted reports to help with plantation management
• reminds me of hackings form focusing on the avalanche of numbers and the relationship between the emergence of statistics and printign technology
• records of sale, ledgers, quantitative data and qualitative comments arranged in a grid
• The same level of control didn’t exist in the north and in industrial factories
• The collection and documenting of these records also provided abolitionists with evidence of the brutal conditions of slavery

Questions

• they definitely didn’t talk about slavery in my business management classes
• Connecting the investigative journalist article to this reading, during their time how did abolitionists investigate, study and reveal the brutality and complexity of the plantation system? How did they get their hands on slave ledgers? How can we learn from the abolitionist movement
• forms were also used for the regulation of slavery

Annotations

(1/15/2026, 10:52:01 AM)

Go to annotation “Slaveholders left behind thousands of volumes of account books. These extensive archives have been widely studied, but rarely as business records.3 This book uses them to reconstruct the management practices of American and West Indian slaveholders from the late eighteenth century through the American Civil War. The portrait that emerges from plantation records is that of a society where precise management and violence went hand in hand. Spared many of the challenges faced by manufacturers relying on wage labor—those of recruiting and retaining workersslaveholders built large and complex organizations, conducted productivity analysis akin to scientific management, and developed an array of ways to value and compare human capital. The limited rights and opportunities of the men, women, and children laboring beneath them facilitated these efforts. Put differently, slavery encouraged the development of sophisticated management practices. Like other entrepreneurs, slaveholders strove to mobilize capital and motivate labor, regularly turning to numbers as an aid to profits. But on plantations, the soft power of quantification supplemented the driving force of the whip.” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 5)

Go to annotation “The precise reply still depends on how you define “capitalism,” but to a great extent we know the answer: slavery was central to the emergence of the economic system that now goes by that name.4” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 6)

Go to annotation “At a minimum, slaveholders (and those who bought their products) built an innovative, global, profit-hungry labor regime that contributed to the emergence of the modern economy.9” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 6)

Go to annotation “Take Frederick Winslow Taylor, founder of the famed system of “scientific management,” discussed in Chapter 3. No history of American management practices fails to linger over Taylor. Slide rule and stopwatch in hand, the Philadelphia engineer is best known for his time and motion studies. By observing and reorganizing the motions of workers, Taylor claimed to be able to achieve massive gains in productivity. At its core, Taylor’s system consisted of the belief that a skilled manager could reconfigure labor processes to make workers more productive: to make more goods with less labor in less time.15” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 9)

Go to annotation “Though Taylor marketed his system as new, even revolutionary, slaveholders using scientific agriculture had already experimented with many of the same techniques. At its peak, scientific agriculture influenced the practices of thousands of planters and overseers. The most calculating practitioners conducted experiments akin to time and motion studies, recording more data than Taylor or his disciples.21 Culling from the surviving records of 114 plantations, economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode recently compiled a data set of 602,219 individual observations of daily cotton picking—far more than the meager and distorted data used to construct Taylor’s “pig tale.”22” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 10)

Go to annotation “Despite this, slavery plays almost no role in histories of management. Even business histories that consider plantation slavery tend to be constrained by the assumption that innovation occurred despite slavery, not because of it. Take Alfred Chandler’s now classic study of American business history, The Visible Hand. Chandler recognized that the plantation overseer may have been the “first salaried manager” in the country, and he was aware that many overseers kept detailed account books, but he nonetheless declared the plantation an “Ancient Form of Large-Scale Production.” In his footnotes, he remarks on the South’s limited investment in capital—but he excludes human capital from his totals. Changing the calculation radically changes the picture, depicting a society where slave capital actually exceeded capital invested in machinery.23” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 10)

Go to annotation “Pointing to the general neglect of slavery in most business histories, management scholar Bill Cooke has described what he calls the “denial of slavery” in management studies.” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 10)

Go to annotation “n some ways my comparative choices are arbitrary—as previously suggested, systems like scientific management often had more symbolic than real influence on managers’ ideas and identities. Henry Ford or Josiah Wedgewood might have been substituted for Frederick Winslow Taylor. This is not an origins story, but in each of the cases I address, slaveholders dealt with complex challenges in sophisticated ways, often concurrent with and sometimes prior to managers in other settings. Their business innovations were as central to the emerging capitalist system as those in free factories.” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 12)

Go to annotation “We live in a global economy where the labor of production is often invisible. Distance and quantitative management facilitate this erasure, and assumptions about capitalism and freedom help conceal it. Neither “free” trade nor “free” markets have any necessary relationship with other kinds of human freedoms. Indeed, the history of plantation slavery shows that the opposite can be true.” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 13)

Go to annotation “By the early nineteenth century, planters could purchase an array of standardized journals and preprinted reports designed to facilitate plantation management. Like blueprints for a machine, preprinted forms guided planters who sought to turn human labor into salable commodities.” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 15)

Go to annotation “The simple format facilitated review and accountability. A planter scanning the report could detect shifting labor patterns as the seasons changed.” (Rosenthal, 2019, p. 19)

Carter, Daniel, Amelia Acker, and Dan Sholler. “Investigative Approaches to Researching Information Technology Companies.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 72, No. 6 (2021): 655–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24446.

Summary of Abstract

• In this article the authors propose using investigation as a model for developing methods to study technologies as critical information studies scholars. They argue that this approach is necessary because information technologies and the companies that develop them are increasingly opaque and the inner workings of technology, power relations, and societal harms are obscured. They argue that investigative journalists provide a good example because of their orientation to power and focus on challenging norms attempts to force accountability.

Notes

• Situates this work within critical information studies as defined by Vaidhyanathan and in the work of Christian Fuchs. The goals of critical information studies is to situate information technologies social, political and economics systems and interrogate the relationship between discourse about technology and the technology’s material underpinnings
• Fuchs argues that the goal of critical information studies is to analyze hwo ICTs are embedded in captialist systems
• If our goal as critical information scholars is to measure harm then due to the opacity and obsfucation of information technologies we must develop new methods to uncover current harms and produce actionable findings. We have to be able to trace harms back to systems and specific choices, norms and values.
• why is analyzing current harms challenging
  • Ubiquitous, ephemeral, and diffuse nature of modern ICTs
  • Difficulty of accessing organization operations if tech companies
  • Tech companies provide the info that they want to thru PR
• While investigate work similar to a journalist may seem outside of the norm of scholarship the authors argue there is a moral and ethical imperative todo this work
• Examples
  • Audit studies
  • Suing companies for access

Current Approaches

• Studies of technical objects
  • Platform studies
  • interface studies
  • software studies
  • These methods can be limited by lack of access to company operations and decisions behind technical features as well as impact on users. This is something I need to address in my proposal. Mainly I am looking to analyze open source implementations of machine learning methods so there’s more information available
  • Analyze the form, affordances, and constraints
• Policy studies
  • Evaluation and critiques of current policies and construction of new frameworks and new policies
  • identify ethical flaws and provide technical or socio-technical solutions
  • Limited by the fact that they only have publicly available information and little insight into how firms craft legal and regulatory strategies

Industry Partnerships

• Currently there is access provided by SDKs, APIs and open datasets often specifically provided to academics
• There are also industry and academic collaboration projects

Journalism and Investigative approaches

• Borrows from methods in social science such as sampling, surveys, audits, interviews, from engineering system identification methods,
• Methods
  • adversarial interviews
  • Former employees and leaks
  • Forensic auditing

Information science

• IS is a metadiscipline according to marcia bates that can be concerned with any subject or knowledge area, we enagage topics across a wide variety of disciplines

Analyzing algorithms

• sometimes research or journalists turn away from the complicated nature of algorithms and their opacity to just focus on documenting outcomes

Questions

• How can we borrow from the techniques and methods of investigative journalists?
• What are some of the ways that we can deal with the obsfucation and opacity when analyzing technical objects and their form and affordances?
• How does thinking about information science/information studies as a meta-discipline inform the way we select and construct methods?
• How do we balance investigating the long history and geneology of information technologies with the near history that tends to go on in research labs, corporate board rooms, and product development meetings?

Quotes

• “In this article we are motivated by concerns that the features of current information technologies and the practices of information technology companies limit critical information studies of harm and, by extension, the potential of critical studies to produce actionable findings.” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 656)
• “While scholars are familiar with methods for measuring harm, the practices of current information technology companies render these methods ineffective for linking harms to the systems producing them. Such analyses are crucial if we want to not only critique existing technologies but also develop insights into the processes that shape technologies and how to improve these in the future.” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 656)
• “Reviewing the practices behind such work, we acknowledge that an investigative approach would run contrary to several current scholarly norms in information science by seeking to reveal information that is purposefully hidden because it evidences harm, liability, or negligence. However, we also position this work in relation to a tradition of scholarship that makes the ethical argument for doing just this kind of research.” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 657)
• “As a critical information studies approach, attending to formal and technical features of objects is a direct way of addressing the information technologies that manifest harm. In contrast to somewhat related approaches such as critical design (e.g., Bardzell & Bardzell, 2013; Dunne, 2005), critiquing and analyzing specific objects does provide a way to speak directly about harms that are actually being perpetrated. However, as Pasquale (2015) argues, opening the black box to reveal what is inside—even for the purpose of critique—can be an ineffective measure when it prompts increased complexity and obfuscation by businesses (p. 8). Furthermore, such studies are most often unable to address the organizational processes behind harmful effects, a limitation to both the development of theory and the viability of such work as public scholarship.” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 658)
• “Both the local/situated and macro-level policy approaches are limited because researchers only have access to one side of policy development and implementation. Researchers typically scour publicly available policy documents and legislative items, submit Freedom of Information Act requests to unseal communications between technology stakeholders and policymakers, and document real-world successes and failures of technology policies. This approach, however, lends very little insight into how technology firms craft their policy and regulatory strategies:” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 658)
• “In her work on the nature of the information disciplines (Bates, 2007; Bates, 2015), Marcia Bates argued that unlike traditional research disciplines (such as biology, social science or art) there are some fields that engage with topics from across a range of disciplines, approaching all phenomena from particular perspectives. She called these fields “meta-disciplines” because of their role in shaping and transmitting knowledge pertinent to the “conventional fields on the academic spectrum” (2015).” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 662)
• “Unlike conventional disciplinary practitioners of scholarly research expertise, educators, journalists, and information professionals can be concerned with any subject or knowledge area as part of their professional vocation” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 662)
• “Information research (in the academy) and the investigative tactics of journalism share an epistemological commitment based on their roles in discovering and disseminating information to their publics.” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 662)
• “In order to fully understand contemporary information technology, it is insufficient to only analyze the formal features of technical objects or their effects without also digging into the processes that made them.” (Carter et al., 2021, p. 663)