publications
overview
My research explores the role of digital data, digital methods and digital infrastructures in collective life. It draws on and engages with feminist science and technology studies, internet studies, critical data studies, algorithm studies, new media art and art-based methods.
Some recent writings have been about:
- unindexing as critical and inventive method
- data not found and tracing the politics of data portals
- critical data practices
- pluralising critical technical practice
- data teasing and the sociology of testing on social media
- algorithm trouble
- network trouble
- “fake news” as infrastructural uncanny
- infrastructural experiments
- the datafication of forests
- the data epic
- data witnessing and data practices at Amnesty International
- data journalism and/as data activism
- histories and historiographies of computational imaginaries
- indices as participatory devices
- data infrastructure literacy
- aspects of data worlds
- considerations for digital methods research (more digital methods publications here)
- networks as storytelling devices
- data visualisations as research objects and devices
My research has been published in journals such as:
- Big Data and Society
- Convergence
- Cultural Geographies
- Data & Policy
- Digital Journalism
- Information, Communication & Society
- International Journal of Communication
- New Media and Society
- Social Media + Society
- Statistique et Société
books
Bounegru, L. & Gray, J. (eds) (2021) The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
📦 PDF (English) / 📦 PDF (Português) / 📦 PDF (Ελληνικά)
Eve, M. & Gray, J. (eds) (2020) Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 📦 PDF
Bounegru, L., Gray, J., Venturini, T. & Mauri, M. (2018) A Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders. Amsterdam: Public Data Lab. 📦 PDF (English) / 📦 PDF (日本語) / 📦 PDF (中文)
Gray, J., Bounegru, L. & Chambers, L. (eds) (2012) The Data Journalism Handbook. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
articles
van Geenen, D., van Es, K., & Gray, J. W. Y. (2023). Pluralising critical technical practice. Convergence.
Marres, N., Colombo, G., Bounegru, L., Gray, J. W. Y., Gerlitz, C., & Tripp, J. (2023). Testing and Not Testing for Coronavirus on Twitter: Surfacing Testing Situations Across Scales With Interpretative Methods. Social Media + Society, 9(3).
Colombo, G., & Gray, J. W. Y. (2023). Un-indexing forest media: Repurposing search query results to reconsider forest-society relations. Cultural Geographies.
Gray, J. W. Y. (2023) What do data portals do? Tracing the politics of online devices for making data public. Data & Policy, 5, E10.
Colombo, G. Bounegru, L. & Gray, J. (2023) Visual Models for Social Media Image Analysis: Groupings, Engagement, Trends, and Rankings. International Journal of Communication, 17: 1956-1983. ISSN 1932-8036.
van Geenen, D., Gray, J. W. Y., Bounegru, L., Venturini, T., Meunier, A., & Jacomy, M. (2023). Staying with the trouble of networks. Frontiers in Big Data.
Gray, J., Bounegru, L., Rogers, R., Venturini, T., Ricci, D., Meunier, A., Mauri, M., Niederer, S., Sanchez-Querubin, N., Tuters, M., Kimbell, L. & Munk, A. (2022). Engaged research-led teaching: Composing collective inquiry with digital methods and data. Digital Culture & Education, 14, 3.
Braghieri, M., Blanke, T. and Gray, J. (2021) Journalism aggregators: an analysis of Longform.org. Journalism Research.
Gray, J., Bounegru, L. & Venturini, T. (2020) ‘Fake news’ as infrastructural uncanny. New Media & Society 22, 2: 317-341.
Gray, J. (2019). Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project. Information, Communication & Society. 1–21.
Gray, J., Gerlitz, C. & Bounegru, L. (2018) “Data Infrastructure Literacy”. Big Data & Society.
Gray, J. (2018) “Three Aspects of Data Worlds”. Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. Issue 1.
Venturini, T., Bounegru, L., Gray, J., & Rogers, R. (2018). “A reality check(list) for digital methods”. New Media & Society.
Gray, J. (2017).“Quand les mondes de données sont redistribués: Open Data, infrastructures de données et démocratie” [“Redistributing Data Worlds: Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Democracy”]. Statistique et Société, 5(3), 29–34.
Bounegru, L., Venturini, T., Gray, J., Jacomy, M. (2016) “Narrating Networks: Exploring the Affordances of Networks as Storytelling Devices in Journalism”, Digital Journalism.
Borgesius, F., Gray, J. & van Eechoud, M. (2016) “Open Data, Privacy and Fair Information Principles: Towards a Balancing Framework”, The Berkeley Technology Law Journal. 30: 3.
Lawson, S., Gray, J. & Mauri, M. (2016) “Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing”. Open Library of Humanities. 2(1), p.e10.
Goldacre, B. & Gray, J. (2016) “Opentrials: Towards a Collaborative Open Database of All Available Information on All Clinical Trials”. Trials. 17 (164).
chapters
Gray, J. W. Y. (2024) Speculative Data Infrastructures: Prototyping a Public Database on Corporate Tax Avoidance. In Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Karin van Es and Tracey Lauriault (eds.) Collaborative Research in the Datafied Society: Methods and Practices for Investigation and Intervention. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Gray, J. & Marres, N. (2023) Articulating Urban Collectives with Data. In Debra Mackinnon, Ryan Burns and Victoria Fast (eds.) Digital (In)justice in the Smart City. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Meunier, A., Gray, J. & Ricci, D. (2021) “Algorithm Trouble”. In Noopur Raval and Amba Kak (eds.) A New AI Lexicon. New York: AI Now Institute.
Gray, J. (2020) “The Datafication of Forests? From the Wood Wide Web to the Internet of Trees.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.) Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gray, J. (2020) “Infrastructural Experiments and the Politics of Open Access.” In M. Eve and J. Gray (eds) Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gray, J. (2020) “The Data Epic: Visualisation Practices for Narrating Life and Death at a Distance.” In H. Kennedy and M. Engebretsen (eds) Data Visualization in Society. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Gray, J. (2020) “Data Worlds”. In A. Feigenbaum and A. Alamalhodaei (eds) The Data Storytelling Workbook. London: Routledge.
Gray, J. & Bounegru, L. (2019) “What a Difference a Dataset Makes? Data Journalism And/As Data Activism.” In J. Evans, S. Ruane and H. Southall (eds) Data in Society: Challenging Statistics in an Age of Globalisation. Bristol: The Policy Press.
Gray, J., & Lammerhirt, D. (2019). Making Data Public? The Open Data Index as Participatory Device. In A. Daly, S. K. Devitt, & M. Mann (Eds.), Good Data. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Gray, J. (2018) “Computational Imaginaries: Some Further Remarks on Leibniz, Llull, and Rethinking the History of Calculating Machines.” In DIA-LOGOS: Ramon Llull’s Method of Thought and Artistic Practice, A. Vega, P. Weibel, and S. Zielinski (eds). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Venturini, T., Jacomy, M., Bounegru, L. & Gray, J. (2018) “Visual Network Exploration for Data Journalists.” In The Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies, S. Eldridge II and B. Franklin (eds). Abingdon: Routledge.
Venturini, T., Bounegru, L., Jacomy, M., & Gray, J. (2017) “How to Tell Stories with Networks: Exploring the Narrative Affordances of Graphs with the Iliad.” In M. Schaefer and K. Van Es (eds) The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Gray, J., Bounegru, L., Milan, S. & Ciuccarelli, P. (2016) “Ways of Seeing Data: Towards a Critical Literacy for Data Visualisations as Research Objects and Research Devices”. In Sebastian Kubitschko and Anne Kaun (eds.), Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gray, J. (2012) “Hamann, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein on the Language of Philosophers”. In Lisa Marie Anderson (ed.), Hamann and the Tradition. Northwestern University Press.
working papers
A selection of working papers, white papers, reports, posts and other things which may be classified as grey literature.
Bounegru, L., Gray, J., Colombo, G., Tsubaki, R. & Tegegne, Y. T. (2022) “Out of the Flames: Mapping Online Engagement and Public Narratives Around the 2019 Amazon Rainforest Fires“. European Forest Institute and Public Data Lab. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6586698
Gray, J., Lamy-Yang, I., Peterson, M-A., Lo, E., Menzies, P. & Yuen, S. (2021) “Face of the virus: Problematic over-representation of East and South East Asian faces in news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic”. bese.an.
Mauri, M., Briones, Á., Gray, J., Haberly, D., & Anderson, C. (2021). “Visualizing Offshore Foreign Direct Investments: The Atlas of Offshore”. Design Culture(s) Cumulus Conference Proceedings Roma 2021, 1127–1143.
Bounegru, L., Marres, N. & Gray, J. (2018) “A Digital Test of the News: Checking the Web for Public Facts”. CIM Warwick and Public Data Lab.
Lämmerhirt, D., Gray, J., Venturini, T. & Meunier, A. (2018) “Advancing sustainability together? Citizen-generated data and the Sustainable Development Goals.” Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, Open Knowledge International and Public Data Lab.
Cobham, A., Gray, J. & Murphy, R. (2017) “What Do They Pay? Towards a Public Database to Account for the Economic Activities and Tax Contributions of Multinational Corporations”. City Political Economy Research Centre (CITYPERC) Working Paper Series, 2017/01.
Gray, J. & Lammerhirt D. (2017) “Data And The City: How Can Public Data Infrastructures Change Lives In Urban Regions?” (PDF). Open Knowledge International and IDRC.
Gray, J. (2017). Digital Methods and Public Policy: Tracing Networks, Assemblages and Devices. Presented as part of panel on Digital Methods for Public Policy, International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP), Singapore.
Gray, J., Lammerhirt D., & Bounegru L. (2016) “Changing What Counts: How Can Citizen-Generated and Civil Society Data Be Used as an Advocacy Tool to Change Official Data Collection?.” Open Knowledge International and the CIVICUS DataShift.
Gray, J. (2015) “Democratising the Data Revolution: A Discussion Paper”. Open Knowledge International.
Gray, J. & Davies, T. (2015) “Fighting Phantom Firms in the UK: From Opening Up Datasets to Reshaping Data Infrastructures?”. Working paper presented at the Open Data Research Symposium at the 3rd International Open Government Data Conference in Ottawa, on May 27th 2015
Gray, J. (2015) “Open Budget Data: Mapping the Landscape”. Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam), the Global Initiative for Financial Transparency (GIFT) and Open Knowledge International.
Gray, J. (2014) “Towards a Genealogy of Open Data”. Working paper given at the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research in Glasgow, 3-6th September 2014.
public writing
A selection of public writing, essays, op-eds, commentaries, interviews, etc.
- Fossil fuel greenwash, Global Witness, 15th February 2023
- Who and what is East and South East Asian Heritage Month for?, bese.an, 25th August 2022
- “Nature-based solutions”: using digital methods to investigate corporate greenwashing, Global Witness, 12th July 2022
- “A decade in data journalism: what has changed?” (interview together with Liliana Bounegru), journalism.co.uk, 22nd December 2021
- “Investigating troubling content on Amazon” (with Marc Tuters, Liliana Bounegru and Thais Lobo), DataJournalism.com, 2nd September 2021
- “Is “another internet possible”? Inside Labour’s digital infrastructure plans”, Open Democracy, 4th December 2019
- “The Data City as Public Experiment?” (with Noortje Marres), London Ideas, 13th July 2018
- “What does fake news tell us about life in the digital age? Not what you might expect”, NiemanLab, 6th April 2017
- “How Could a Global Public Database Help to Tackle Corporate Tax Avoidance?”, Open Democracy, 17th February 2017
- “Datafication and Democracy”, Juncture, 21st December 2016
- “‘Let us Calculate!’: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination”, The Public Domain Review, 10th November 2016
- “Who will shape the future of the data society?”, cross-posted on LSE Impact Blog, the International Open Data Conference blog and Open Knowledge International blog, 5th October 2016.
- “It’s time to stand up to greedy academic publishers” [Note: title chosen by Guardian editorial team], The Guardian, 18th April 2016
- “Making Climate Negotiations Public”, Open Democracy (with Tommaso Venturini and Rufus Pollock), 9th December 2015
- “A Data Revolution for Whom?”, Open Democracy, 10th July 2015
- “Dutch student protests ignite movement against management of universities”, The Guardian, 17th March 2015
- “Five ways open data can boost democracy around the world”, The Guardian, 20th February 2015
- “Secret government contracts stop citizens knowing if outsourcing works”, The Guardian, 18th August 2014
- “Secret government contracts undermine our democracies. Let’s stop them”, OpenDemocracy, 27th February 2014.
- “Britain ‘shines light of transparency’ on secret lobbying. Just kidding.”, OpenDemocracy, 28th January 2014.
- “Mapping the Cultural Commons”, Cblog, French Ministry of Culture and Communication, 15th November 2013.
- “Open Government Partnership Should Foster Accountability and Social Justice”, The Guardian, 4th November 2013.
- “Recomposing Scholarship”, London School of Economics ‘Impact of Social Sciences’ Blog, 25th October 2013.
- “The Genius and the Soil: Open Access and the Politics of Information”, Red Pepper, April-May 2013 (Issue 189).
- “The Future of Memory”, The Junket, 16th July 2012
- “What Data Can and Cannot Do”, The Guardian, 31st May 2012.
- “On Archiving Everything: Borges, Calvino, Google”, OWNI.eu, 25th August 2011.
reviews
- “On Critical Theories and Digital Media”. Review of David Berry’s Critical Theory and the Digital (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Christian Fuchs’ Social Media: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage, 2014) for Krisis: Journal of Contemporary Philosophy.
- Review of Martin Eve’s Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) for LSE Review of Books, 7th November 2014.
- “The Snowden Files: so much more than state surveillance” – a review of Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man for OpenDemocracy, 6th February 2014.
open access
I try to make sure that all of my publications are freely available online.
Copies of texts and other materials are shared at:
If you still can’t find something, let me know.
If you’re interested in reading more about the politics of open access you may be interested in this book edited with Martin Eve – including a chapter I wrote on “infrastructural experiments” such as the open access button.