Public Data Cultures was recently highlighted in round-up of “better images of AI on book covers” by the wonderful Better Images of AI project.

The post can be found here. A couple of excerpts are copied below.

We’re often told not to judge a book by its cover. And yet, a cover is often the reason why a reader first picks up a book. A book’s cover design is the window into its story and the author’s intentions. For Better Images of AI, in the context of books about AI and technologies, it’s refreshing to see covers that go beyond unhelpful norms and stereotypes such as tropes of robots, glowing brains, and unnecessary (white) men in suits.

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‘Public Data Cultures’ explores the practices and cultures of how data is made public in the age of the Internet. Typically, the language is saturated with extractive and industrial metaphors: “data mining”, “data harvesting”, “data pipelines”, and the common phrase, “data is the new oil”. Gray’s book aims to centre the idea of public data as a networked cultural material through a more critical and creative interrogation of what it means to make data public.

Visual representations of data, especially those used to reflect AI training datasets, show data in vast holograms, giving the impression that data is abstract, objective and impersonal. Gray’s choice of cover shows that data is relational, embedded in culture, and embodied. The colour scheme of earthy tones also reflects associations with natural materials which is interesting given the environmentally-themed metaphors mentioned at the start. However, instead of Gray using these tones to the promote the idea that data is a resource to be consumed with economic value (like land), the cover could be hinting more at the ideas of solidarity, community management, and stewardship reflected in our environmental ecosystems.