At his relatively new Half Thoughts blog, Dave Beer has assembled a number of pieces into a virtual book, some of which are open access.

Over several years I’ve been working on a little background project that I’ve called ‘Reading Critical Data Studies’. The idea was quite simple. I tried to read and write about books in the field that I thought would be useful for teaching or that might help with research. It wasn’t possible to write about every book I encountered, there’s never enough time, so I picked out things that seemed important in some way or that covered a range of issues. In the pieces I wrote, I tried to respond to the ideas and perspectives in the books, offering thoughts and questions too. Together these pieces would hopefully add something to the debates.

I thought about it as a kind of book that would never actually be a book. So, instead, I’ve created a contents page below with links to the pieces. I’ve not included all the reviews I’ve done over the last few years, instead I’ve picked out eleven pieces that capture different issues in critical data studies (broadly conceived) and that might work alongside one another. Each chapter aims to find a way into the field through a focus on one book.

The full contents and links to all the pieces are here.