I love a good reading list and have found ones posted online so helpful in building my own (for example, the Critical Algorithm Studies list), so I thought I’d share a couple. First is a recent list I made for the open access journal Places and the remaining three are from my PhD qualifying exams. Happy reading!

print by Ann Altstatt

1) Cloud Vision, reading list for Places Journal

How can we understand the vast assemblages of networked computers that have come to subtend almost every aspect of political, social, and cultural life? Constantly at work on massive scales and at the speed of light, exceeding our ability to make sense of them, they construct the world in unpredictable and surprising ways. Hidden behind metaphors like ‘the cloud,’ fragments of these networks sometimes come into view. Geographies of wires, cables, data centers, servers, satellites, and other material things that make computing possible dot the landscape, if one knows where to look. Sometimes these networks become visible upon breakdown, as hacked appliances take down whole sections of the internet or as computational models fail spectacularly to predict human action and desires. And they are constantly producing new ways of seeing and acting in the world by making particular patterns, processes, and inferences visible to users. The cloud, then, poses unique theoretical and methodological challenges for scholars attempting to make sense of these emerging geographies. The reading list that follows offers a number of cuts on this problem from scholars in a range of disciplines, all with their heads in the cloud.

SEE THE LIST ON PLACESJOURNAL.ORG

2) Qualifying exams reading lists

LIST 1: SCIENCE ←→ SOCIAL THEORY

LIST 2: SPATIAL THEORY IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

LIST 3: DIGITAL STUDIES: STRUCTURING EFFECTS

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