While I don’t necessarily agree with all points made by these respective works, I have found them valuable for expanding (and challenging) my thinking on the human side of data-intensive systems. This list is neither static, nor frequently updated, but I always appreciate suggestions.

Titles are written in the French grammatical style generally because that is the singular piece of French grammar that I quite like.

Labor perspective of digital piecework and/or modern computing:

• Work without the workers (Peter Jones)
• Behind the screen (Sarah T. Roberts)
• Ghost work (Mary Gray, Siddharth Suri)
• Encoding race, encoding class (Sareeta Amrute)
• What you are getting wrong about Appalachia (Elizabeth Catte)

Critiques of modern data-intensive systems:

• Race after technology (Ruha Benjamin)
• Algorithms of oppression (Safiya Noble)
• Automating inequality (Virginia Eubanks)
• Weapons of math destruction (Cathy O’Neil)
• Everybody lies (Seth Stephens-Davidowitz)
• Invisible women (Caroline Criado Pérez)
• Data feminism (Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein)
• Feminist AI (Kerry McInerney, Eleanor Drage, Stephen Cave, Jude Browne)
• Your face belongs to us (Kashmir Hill)

Environmental impact of data-intensive systems:

• Atlas of AI (Kate Crawford) [chapter 1]
• The politics of bitcoin (David Golumbia)
• Manual for survival: an environmental history of the Chernobyl disaster (Kate Brown) [on quite literally handling and communicating fallout from environmental disasters]

Technical inspections of data and missing data:

• Redacted (Lilly Irani, Jesse Marx)
• Artificial unintelligence (Meredith Broussard)
• All data are local (Yanni Loukissas)
• Everyday adventures with unruly data (Melanie Feinberg)

Techno-solutionism approaches to bias and their critiques:

• The ethical algorithm (Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth)
• The promise of access (Daniel Greene)
• The internet police (Nate Anderson)
• Resisting AI: an anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence (Dan McQuillian)

Historical (or situated) discussions of computing ethos:

• From counterculture to cyberculture (Fred Turner)
• Your computer is on fire (Mar Hicks, Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Kavita Philip)
• Silicon values (Jillian York)
• Silicon valley fever (Judith K. Larsen, Everett M. Rogers)
• Zeros and ones: digital women and the new technoculture (Sadie Plant)
• Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution (Steven Levy)
• Going dark: the secret social lives of extremists (Julia Ebner)
• Whole earth: the many lives of Stewart Brand (John Markoff)
• How sex changed the internet and the internet changed sex (Samantha Cole)
• Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of anonymous (Gabriella Coleman)
• Uncanny valley: a memoir (Anna Wiener)
• You are not expected to understand this: how 26 lines of code changed the world (Torie Bosch)

Complexity of data terminology, use, and preservation:

• Native American DNA (Kim Tallbear)
• Data is never raw (Lisa Gitelman, ed.)
• Cloud ethics (Louise Amoore)

Data literacy, communicating data, and data ownership:

• W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
• How charts lie (Albert Cairo)
• From newspeak to cyberspeak (Slava Gerovitch)

Data interaction monologues:

• Blockchain chicken farm (Xiaowei Wang)
• Living in data (Jer Thorp)

Visions of AI on the horizon (fiction and not):

• The great automatic grammatizator and other stories (Rohl Dahl)
• The beautiful bureaucrat (Helen Phillips)
• The mysterious affair at Olivetti (Meryle Secrest)