"Public Data Cultures" book talk
Join us for an evening celebrating the launch of Public Data Cultures.
The book nurtures critical and creative engagements with public data as cultural material, medium of participation and as site of transnational politics. It explores how activists, journalists, artists and others work with public data as well as looking at how critical perspectives can make a difference in practice.
After a short book talk, there will be a collective discussion moment and time to catch up with others with overlapping curiosities.
“In an era when ‘data’ seems so often a tool of oppression and control, this book provides a marvellous, salutary exploration of its deployment for social change. This is a core optimistic message for our times; Gray is the ideal guide.” - Geoffrey C. Bowker, UC Irvine
“This is an enchanting guide to a defining phenomenon of digital culture, which shows how different worlds may come about through practising data otherwise.” - Noortje Marres, author of Digital Sociology
From the book blurb:
Public data shapes what we know and how we live together. It is often digital, freely available and related to matters of shared concern, from global warming graphs to collaborative spreadsheets documenting mass layoffs. It circulates via maps and apps which enable us to discover, report and rate what is around us.
Public Data Cultures explores the practices and cultures of how data is made public in the age of the Internet. Looking beyond familiar narratives of data as a resource to be liberated or protected, this book offers new perspectives on public data as networked cultural material, as medium of participation and as site of transnational politics. To better account for how data makes a difference, the book argues for a more expansive conception of what is involved in making data public. In doing so, it focuses not just on removing restrictions but also on caring for arrangements involved in making data public in ways that grow shared understanding and solidarity in responding to the many intersecting troubles of our times.
Nurturing critical and creative engagements with data, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of media, communications, Internet studies, science and technology studies and digital humanities, as well as artists, designers, engineers, reporters, public sector workers, community organisers and activists working with data.
About the author:
Jonathan W. Y. Gray (@jwyg) explores the roles digital data, methods and infrastructures in shaping how we know and live together. He is the author of Public Data Cultures (Polity, 2025). At King’s College London, he is Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities and co-director of the Centre for Digital Culture. He is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab; research associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris); and has taught with the School for Poetic Computation in NYC. More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org.