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)
Environmental impact of data-intensive systems:
- Atlas of AI (Kate Crawford) [chapter 1]
- The politics of bitcoin (David Golumbia)
Technical inspections of data and missing data:
- Redacted (Lilly Irani, Jesse Marx)
- Artificial unintelligence (Meredith Broussard)
- All data are local (Yanni Loukissas)
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)
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)
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)
Data interaction monologues:
- Blockchain chicken farm (Xiaowei Wang)
- Living in data (Jer Thorp)