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Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. The filing cabinet emerges here 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.

How the passport developed as a document speaks to migration studies, diplomatic and legal history, and, more generally, to those interested in the history and development of surveillance technologies. Craig Robertson explains how Americans learned to document an identity, who can establish such an identity, and to what purpose such an identity can be put.

Abstract
This article provides a particular history of the file. It does not focus on the content of specific files or the development of filing systems. Instead it moves files from a history of administrative writing to a history of information storage technologies. My argument is that if we get ›under the hood‹ of the filing cabinet and manila folder to understand how they work we learn how information was conceptualized and understood such that it could contribute to the goals of efficiency critical to corporate capitalism. It is the contention of this article that information is a historically specific concept and the early 20th century emergence of the tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet offer insights into the development of a distinctly modern conception of information as impersonal, discrete, and therefore easily extracted. I offer the concept of ›granular certainty‹ to show how information was conceptualize, practically constituted and organized. This emphasizes the overlap between the importance of efficiency's embrace of standardization and the specific and a conception of information as something specific. The tabbed manila folder and the vertical filing cabinet emerged from this overlap between efficiency and information.

AbstractA forgotten diplomatic controversy centered on the claim to U.S. protection by a yet‐to‐be‐naturalized citizen is analyzed to offer insights into the mid‐nineteenth century understanding of the status and function of the documentation of individual identity. It makes clear the documentation of identity had a contested and gradual development. Documentation was contested in that people (both officials and members of the public) struggled to understand how it was that a document identified a person. This uncertainty centered not only on who had the authority to document identity, but how that authority was represented on a document. Beyond its mid‐nineteenth century and U.S. focus this essay is intended to provide the context for an understanding of the administrative, bureaucratic, and social developments that had to occur before identification documents could play a pivotal role in the development of the twentieth century state. In this way it suggests that official identification is an important object of analysis for debates about the articulation of information and governing in state formation.

This article historicizes the archive as a mechanism of exclusion. It focuses on three archival sites (the development of archival rationalization in the 19th century, national archives and the collecting of government documents, and the discipline of history) to analyze their shared logics of classification, identity, evidence, and authenticity. These three sites are connected through the author's attempts to research and write a history of the passport within cultural studies. The archive, therefore, provides a site from which to clarify what is at stake in the claims of cultural studies to be an interdisciplinary project.