The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion by Grant Bollmer
"The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion by Grant Bollmer is a discursive and nonlinear account of psychology’s history in North America that shows how the techniques used in labs precede and produce the affects they identify. The titular “affect lab” is defined as the moment of utilization of a technological medium to identify human emotion. "
Reviewed by Sakshi Chanana
Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and a New Politics of Recognition by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
"In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun describes both how data are used to discriminate and how users must be discriminating in how they make use of data. Chun applies her cross-disciplinary academic background and identity as a first-generation Canadian immigrant to analyze the ideology of the Internet and surveillance culture."
Reviewed by Bea Wohl
Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age by Heather Ford
"Facts do not come to us on their own. They often require an entire host of individuals, meanings, and materials to help them survive the terrain of information and arrive in front of us either as a summary on Wikipedia, a network graph on Wikidata, or a brief statement on a Google knowledge card. This argument is at the core of Heather Ford’s examination of a set of facts that became attached to the Wikipedia article titled “2011 Egyptian Revolution.” Through a combination of interviews, media-sensitive readings of Wikipedian edits, and data, Ford examines the life cycle of the fact of the revolution as it circulated on the web."
Reviewed by Steve Jankowski
Data and Democracy at Work: Advanced Information Technologies, Labor Law, and the New Working Class by Brishen Rogers
"The realities faced by many US workers today from sensor-packed warehouses that surveil workers, enforce punishing working conditions, and squash organizing efforts to apps that algorithmically manage workers, giving them little control or recourse on the job—affront both dignity and democracy."
Reviewed by Christine T. Wolf
The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance by Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert
"In The Secret Life of Data, Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert set forth a difficult task for themselves. They aimed to write a book about algorithmic surveillance that carves a middle way between “sensationalistic or overtly partisan” work written for a general reader, on the one hand, and scholarship that “dives deeply into a specific aspect of the larger issue,” on the other (xiv)."
Reviewed by James J. Brown, Jr.
Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology by Aaron Trammell
"Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology is a valuable read. Author Aaron Trammell engages in a critical examination of the academic interpretation of play, widely examining global scholars from a North American lens that not only opens bodies of literature for postmortem examination but also does so meaningfully."
Reviewed by Lindsay Grace