Thanks to a period of research leave this summer I was finally able to catch up with some long overdue reading! After months of not spending much time on research at all due to the pandemic and industrial action, it was a real pleasure to catch up on things that I’d missed. I didn’t quite get through everything I wanted to – is that even possible?- but I did find time to explore some gems in these piles.

There’s so much good stuff in there, but a few I found particularly interesting – in no particular order – were:

• Alison Powell’s Undoing Optimisation
• Linnet Taylor and Nadezhda Purtova’s What is responsible and sustainable data science? (BD&S)
• Rob Kitchin’s second edition of The Data Revolution
• Jennifer Gabrys’ Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance (BD&S)
• Anne Henriksen and Anja Bechmann’s Building truths in AI: Making predictive algorithms doable in healthcare (ICS)
• Declan Kuch and colleagues’ The promise of precision: datafication in medicine, agriculture and education (Policy Studies)
• Marina Micheli and colleagues’ Emerging models of data governance in the age of datafication (BD&S)
• Will Orr and Jenny Davis’ Attributions of ethical responsibility by Artificial Intelligence practitioners (ICS)
• Abeda Birhane and colleagues’ The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research (Arxiv)
• Morten Bay’s Four challenges to Confucian virtue ethics in technology (Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society)

Highly recommend you checking these out! And now to get started on my 2021 reading list…