I’m pleased to announce that my book on Data Worlds: The Politics Open and Public Data in the Digital Age is now under contract at MIT Press. 🎊 📖

The book has been a long time in the making and builds on over a decade of research and engagements with public data practices, cultures, projects and infrastructures (which you can sample here).

If you’d like to be notified when the book is published you can leave your details here and I’ll be in touch when the book is out (and those who are interested can opt-in to receive occasional updates and previews): https://bit.ly/data-worlds-update

An excerpt from the book’s prospectus and current table of contents is copied below.

Data Worlds: The Politics of Open and Public Data in the Digital Age

How are digital technologies changing the social life and politics of public data? How are different actors making, making sense with and changing things with public data? How can we rethink public participation and democratic politics in relation to data infrastructures and “datafication”? Data Worlds explores the visions, practices and technologies associated with open and public data over the past decade, and their broader implications for the future of the “data society”. Drawing on a combination of interviews, content analysis and digital methods research, the book provides empirical engagements with a wide variety of public data projects, theoretical perspectives on their world-making capacities, as well as an agenda for research and intervention around digital public data practices. This includes examining what can be learned through the work by “data activists” to compose alternative public data infrastructures, as well as the prospect of “critical data practice”, modifying data practices in light of critical research on datafication.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Making Data Public, Making Public Data
1. Origin Stories and Conventions of Open Data
2. Ways of Seeing, Knowing and Being with Data
3. Doing Participation with Data
4. Coordinating Data Collectives and Transnational Data Worldmaking
5. Missing Data and Making Data: Data Infrastructural Interventions
6. Doing Data Differently? Towards a Critical Data Practice
Conclusion: Recomposing Data Worlds