- Books
- Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles
- Selected Book Chapters
- Selected White Papers & Working Papers
- Selected Essays & Public Writing
- Book Reviews
You can download the books, articles and chapters listed below as a single zip file of PDFs here.
I try to make sure that all of my publications are freely available online through green or gold open access.
If there is anything that you can’t find please try this list of links. If you still can’t find it, please get in touch.
If you’d like to encourage other researchers to open up their research, you can install the open access button.
Books
Gray, J. (in preparation) Data Worlds: The Politics of Open and Public Data in the Digital Age. Under contract with MIT Press.
Gray, J. & Bounegru, L. (eds) (2021) The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice.. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
“The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice provides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emerging field. With more than 70 chapters from leading researchers and leading practitioners of data journalism, it explores the work needed to render technologies and data productive for the purposes of journalism. It also gives a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the social lives of datasets, data infrastructures, and data stories in newsrooms, media organisations, startups, civil society organisations and beyond. The book includes sections on ‘doing issues with data’, ”assembling data’, ‘working with data’, ‘experiencing data’, ‘investigating data’, ‘platforms and algorithms’, ‘organising data journalism’, ‘training data journalists’ and ‘situating data journalism’.”
Details and order here. Available as free, open access PDF. Interview about the book here. Translations available in Greek and Portuguese (with more in the making).
“This is a stellar collection that spans applied and scholarly perspectives on practices of data journalism, rich with insights into the work of making data tell stories.” – Kate Crawford, New York University
“This stimulating new book offers researchers and journalists alike the welcome chance to reflect critically on how important new uses of quantification are inspiring what has become known as data journalism. The variety of voices, data, and examples are revelatory.” – Wendy Espeland, Northwestern University
“It is now established that data is entangled with politics and embedded in history and society. This bountiful book highlights the crucial role of data journalists as users and critics of data, and in facilitating public engagement and discussion around it.” – Emmanuel Didier, Ecole normale supérieure
“Profound and practical, this sparkling collection engages the topic of data journalism with rich insights into the nature of numbers in the news.” – Geoffrey C. Bowker, University of California, Irvine
“This book is an impressive feat. Bounegru and Gray have put together a truly global and diverse collection that greatly enriches our understanding of the politics of data and what it means for journalism. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, this contribution is more important than ever.” – Lina Dencik, Cardiff University
“Ostensibly focused on data journalism, this handbook is so much more, providing an overarching analysis of much of the emerging field of critical data studies. Journalists and others interested in how to assemble, work with, make sense of, apply, and critically reflect on data and their uses will revel in the extensive theoretical and practical insights.” – Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University
“The Data Journalism Handbook is an indispensable resource for students, researchers, and journalists who want to understand how data are translated into information, information in knowledge and, ultimately, wisdom. That itinerary all starts with a full comprehension of how data reflect, construct and shape our social reality.” – José van Dijck, Utrecht University
“The variety, diversity, and depth of the contributions to this collective effort make this book a required reading for beginners and professionals alike.” – Alberto Cairo, University of Miami
“This magical multitudinous book is an experiment that will shape the future of critical data journalism.” – Celia Lury, University of Warwick
“By providing a wealth of living testimonies from practitioners and academics from different countries, this book gives a rich overview of practices that have become key in contemporary journalism. The main virtue of this book is to give a set of practical insights to help journalists not only to better cooperate with their peers but also to establish more fruitful relationships with researchers and publics.” – Sylvain Parasie, Sciences Po
“This wide-ranging and thoughtfully curated volume is an essential companion for researchers and practitioners who seek to rethink what data can mean for themselves and their audiences.” – Yanni A. Loukissas, Georgia Tech
“An intelligent and cutting-edge entry-point to the field of data journalism, sure to become an essential part of curricula and research around this topic.” – Anja Bechmann, Aarhus University
Eve, M. & Gray, J. (eds) (2020) Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
“A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies.
The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. he contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.”
Details and order from here. Available as free, open access PDF. Podcast about the book here.“The variety of material is impressive … Almost every chapter contained something new and interesting to me.” – Mark C. Wilson, Journal of Scholarly Publishing
Bounegru, L., Gray, J., Venturini, T. & Mauri, M. (2018) A Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders. Amsterdam: Public Data Lab.
“A Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders explores the use of digital methods to study false viral news, political memes, trolling practices and their social life online. It responds to an increasing demand for understanding the interplay between digital platforms, misleading information, propaganda and viral content practices, and their influence on politics and public life in democratic societies.”
Translated into Japanese and Chinese with Spanish translation forthcoming.
Open access PDF available at: fakenews.publicdatalab.org.
DOI: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1136271.
All assets available on GitHub.
“A remarkable new document” – Nieman Lab
“A crucial set of skills for understanding media consumption in the new era” – Columbia Journalism Review
“Important new research” – Adam Thomas, Director, European Journalism Centre
“A great project” – Charlie Beckett, Professor and Director of Polis, London School of Economics
Gray, J., Bounegru, L. & Chambers, L. (eds) (2012) The Data Journalism Handbook. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
Translated into Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili and Ukranian.
Open access PDF available at: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1281348
“A great practical start” – BBC Academy.
“A unique journalistic collaboration” – The Guardian.
“An excellent book” – Knight Digital Media Center, University of Southern California.
“Inspiring and educational” – ReadWrite.
“Immensely valuable… read it now” – Significance magazine of The Royal Statistical Society and The American Statistical Association.
“An excellent introduction” – Statistics Norway.
“Seminal” – Roselyn Du, Hong Kong Baptist University.
Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles
Braghieri, M., Blanke, T. and Gray, J. (2021) Journalism aggregators: an analysis of Longform.org. Journalism Research.
Open access in English: PDF / HTML. Open access in German: PDF / HTML.
Gray, J., Bounegru, L. & Venturini, T. (2020) ‘Fake news’ as infrastructural uncanny. New Media & Society 22, 2: 317-341.
Open Access PDF: 10.1177/1461444819856912
Gray, J. (2019). Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project. Information, Communication & Society. 1–21.
Open Access PDF: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1573915
Gray, J., Gerlitz, C. & Bounegru, L. (2018) “Data Infrastructure Literacy”. Big Data & Society.
Open Access PDF: 10.1177/2053951718786316
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.
DOI: 10.1177/1461444818769236.
Preprint: 10.2139/ssrn.3168664
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.
Open Access PDF: 10.1080/21670811.2016.1186497
“Invaluable analytical study” – Alan Liu, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara.
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.
Open Access HTML and PDF: 10.16995/olh.72
“Rigorous, balanced analysis” – Professor Stephen Curry, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London.
Goldacre, B. & Gray, J. (2016) “Opentrials: Towards a Collaborative Open Database of All Available Information on All Clinical Trials”. Trials. 17 (164).
Open Access HTML and PDF: 10.1186/s13063-016-1290-8
Selected Book Chapters
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.
Abstract, introduction and table of contents for the book on Bruno Latour’s website. You can find more about the associated exhibition at ZKM Center for Art and Media and recordings from the online launch here.
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.
Open Access PDF of book: 10.5117/9789463722902
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.
Preprint: 10.5281/zenodo.1415450.
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.
Open access PDF of our chapter (Zenodo) and open access PDF of the whole book (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.
Open access PDF of the chapter.
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.
Preprint: ssrn.com/abstract=3043912.
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.
Open Access PDF of book: 10.5117/9789462981362.
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.
Preprint: ssrn.com/abstract=2846398
Gray, J. (2012) “Hamann, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein on the Language of Philosophers”. In Lisa Marie Anderson (ed.), Hamann and the Tradition. Northwestern University Press.
Preprint: ssrn.com/abstract=2407424.
“A good picture of the current state of the scholarship on this fascinating but still little-appreciated figure of the German 18th century” – Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
“A most valuable contribution to Hamann studies” – Goethe Yearbook
Selected White Papers & Working Papers
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., & 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.
Selected Essays & Public Writing
Following is a selection of some recent press pieces and a few older essays. Further articles can be found via author profiles on The Guardian, Open Democracy and Journalisted.
- “A decade in data journalism: what has changed?” (interview together with Liliana Bounegru), journalism.co.uk, 22nd December 2021
- “Algorithm Trouble” (with Axel Meunier and Donato Ricci), A New AI Lexicon, AI Now Institute, 16th 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
- “Let me count the ways” – Ellen Miller, Co-Founder, Sunlight Foundation
- “Datafication and Democracy”, Juncture, 21st December 2016
- “Essential reading” – Think Tank Review
- “A great read … pointing towards a critical and ethical agenda for ‘data work’” – Tim Davies, Research Associate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
- “‘Let us Calculate!’: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination”, The Public Domain Review, 10th November 2016
- “Nice article on Lull, Leibniz & combinatorics” – Dennis Duncan, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford
- “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.
- “Lots of good questions in here” – Alex Howard, Senior Analyst, Sunlight Foundation
- “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
- “Excellent piece” – Andrew McGettigan, Author of The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education
- “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.
- “A great and critical piece on open government” – Evgeny Morozov, Author of To Save Everything, Click Here
- “Recomposing Scholarship”, London School of Economics ‘Impact of Social Sciences’ Blog, 25th October 2013.
- “Good piece on what matters” – Mary Margaret McCabe, Professor of Ancient Philosophy, King’s College London
- “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.
- “Brilliant must read article” – Owen Barder, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
- “Smart piece” – Kenneth Cukier, Data Editor, The Economist
- “On Archiving Everything: Borges, Calvino, Google”, OWNI.eu, 25th August 2011.
Book 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.