Here are 100 books that How Data Happened fans have personally recommended if you like
How Data Happened.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
How and why do states keep secrets? Soll provides powerful and, at times, surprising answers to this question by turning to the absolutist governments of early modern Europe, and specifically the administrator Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
As the key minister of state under King Louis XIV, Colbert built a powerful system of information collection and control that, in many ways, anticipated the modern national security state. If you want to make sense of government collection of data and state secrecy today, Soll’s book is a must-read.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert saw governance of the state not as the inherent ability of the king, but as a form of mechanical mastery of subjects such as medieval legal history, physics, navigation, and the price lists of nails, sails, and gunpowder. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state.
This innovative book argues that Colbert's practice of collecting knowledge originated in Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship and trade. By connecting historical literatures-archives, libraries, merchant techniques,…
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
Today, archives are places where we go to research and learn about the past. But as Popper’s fascinating book shows, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, governments used archives like we use computers and databases today as facilities for storing information they considered immediately relevant to solving political problems.
Just like we use computers today, governments mobilized archives to collect, organize, and redeploy information to advance their specific policy objectives. While the early modern world might seem quite distant from our own, Popper shows us that the problem of using information to exert political power is a very old one.
An exploration of the proliferation of paper in early modern Britain and its far-reaching effects on politics and society.
We are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive, Nicholas Popper shows that earlier eras had to grapple with the same problem-how to deal with too much information at their fingertips.
He reveals that early modern Britain was a society newly drowning in paper, a light and durable technology whose spread allowed statesmen to record drafts, memoranda, and other ephemera that might otherwise…
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
How do citizens learn to accept violence perpetuated by their own governments? Answering this profoundly relevant and timely question lies at the heart of Linstrum’s book–and data lies at the crux of the answer. He shows how, despite massive amounts of data about colonial violence circulating in postwar Britain, British people found ways to accommodate and justify that violence.
This book is a sobering challenge to the belief that better information produces better and more empathetic societies, showing that the connection between knowledge and enlightened behavior is not nearly as straightforward as we may want to believe.
An eye-opening account of how violence was experienced not just on the frontlines of colonial terror but at home in imperial Britain.
When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources, but by sentiments…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
If you love NPR as much as I do, then this is the book for you! Shepperd tells the fascinating story of how public radio came into being in the US during the mid-twentieth century–and how public radio played a crucial role in defining Americans’ expectations about what they have the right to know about their government’s activities.
If you want to make sense of the historical relationship between democracy and data, then this is the book for you!
Winner of the 2024 BEA Book Award
Runner-up in the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)
Runner-up for the AJHA Book of the Year (American Journalism Historians Association).
Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. Josh Shepperd looks at the people, institutions, and influences behind the media reform movement and clearinghouse the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the drive to create what became the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio.
Founded in 1934, the NAEB began as a disorganized collection of undersupported…
I’m an economics professor, but I also have a column in Australia’s leading financial newspaper so I really appreciate authors who can tackle complex topics in an accessible manner. I’m also both extremely interested in and do academic research on topics to do with technologies like two-sided platforms, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. All these books made me think harder about the big issues in these areas, and how to combine rigorous research with what is actually happening—often at breakneck speed—in the real-world digital economy.
This book helped me understand why advances in artificial intelligence are going to have a big impact on productivity and economic growth. I loved the analogies to old technologies like electrification of factories, and newer examples like how Team New Zealand used simulations to change racing tactics and boat design.
The book has an important, big idea at its heart. That idea is that AI helps organizations make better predications, and those better predictions allow organizations to be fundamentally redesigned to take advantage of this. This is where the AI productivity revolution comes from.
"What does AI mean for your business? Read this book to find out." -- Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google Artificial intelligence does the seemingly impossible, magically bringing machines to life--driving cars, trading stocks, and teaching children. But facing the sea change that AI will bring can be paralyzing. How should companies set strategies, governments design policies, and people plan their lives for a world so different from what we know? In the face of such uncertainty, many analysts either cower in fear or predict an impossibly sunny future.
But in Prediction Machines, three eminent economists recast the rise of AI…
I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
I am laughing out loud, even now that I am rereading this book for the umpteenth time. Fraudsters are so clever, and so is advertising. And then there is sloppy journalism with its “wow” statistics.
I like his book enormously, not least because of its witty illustrations. It is subversive, comic, and provocative, and it makes me wise to seductive, misleading practices–and it does so with a light touch.
From distorted graphs and biased samples to misleading averages, there are countless statistical dodges that lend cover to anyone with an ax to grind or a product to sell. With abundant examples and illustrations, Darrell Huff's lively and engaging primer clarifies the basic principles of statistics and explains how they're used to present information in honest and not-so-honest ways. Now even more indispensable in our data-driven world than it was when first published, How to Lie with Statistics is the book that generations of readers have relied on to keep from being fooled.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I’m an Associate Professor in the University of Alabama’s Department of Philosophy. I worked as an FBI Special Agent before making the natural transition to academic philosophy. Being a professor was always a close second to Quantico, but that scene in Point Break in which Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze fight Anthony Kiedis on the beach made it seem like the FBI would be more fun than academia. In my current position as a professor at the University of Alabama, I teach in my department’s Jurisprudence Specialization. My primary research interests are at the intersection of philosophy of law, political philosophy, and criminal justice. I’ve written three books on policing.
I love this book because it reminds us of the many ways that technology can affect justice.
It is tempting to think sophisticated tactics such as “predictive policing” can solve all problems relating to human bias. However, Brayne shows that data and algorithms do not eliminate bias and discretion. Instead, high-tech police tools simply make bias less overt and visible, which erodes the public’s ability to hold the police accountable.
I especially enjoyed how the book flips the script, considering diverse ways to use these tools to help the public. For example, how can municipalities use technology to analyze the underlying factors that contribute to policing problems in the first place?
The scope of criminal justice surveillance, from the police to the prisons, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, health, and marketing. While law enforcement's use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences.
In Predict and Surveil, Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law…
I've had a long-time interest in two things: mathematics and social issues. This is why I got degrees in social work (Masters) and sociology (PhD) and eventually focused on the quantitative aspects of these two areas. Social Workers Count gave me the chance to marry these two interests by showing the role mathematics can play in illuminating a number of pressing social issues.
Jun Otsuka, a philosopher who also has training in statistics, zooms in on their philosophical foundations.
His book discusses the metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic assumptions on which Classical statistics, Bayesian statistics, predictive/classification AI models, and causal inference are based.
For those interested in these disciplines but who're also sensitive to the philosophical issues they raise, Otsuka's book is simply amazing. Run out and get a copy as soon as possible.
Simply stated, this book bridges the gap between statistics and philosophy. It does this by delineating the conceptual cores of various statistical methodologies (Bayesian/frequentist statistics, model selection, machine learning, causal inference, etc.) and drawing out their philosophical implications. Portraying statistical inference as an epistemic endeavor to justify hypotheses about a probabilistic model of a given empirical problem, the book explains the role of ontological, semantic, and epistemological assumptions that make such inductive inference possible. From this perspective, various statistical methodologies are characterized by their epistemological nature: Bayesian statistics by internalist epistemology, classical statistics by externalist epistemology, model selection by pragmatist…
I taught for 45 years at Ithaca College broken by two years as Fulbright Professor in West Africa at the University of Liberia. During my years in academia, I developed several new courses including a popular “Math in Africa” class and the first U.S. course for college credit in chess theory. I’ve always had a passion for and continue to have strong interests in (1) national educational and social issues concerning equal access to math education for all and (2) teaching others about the power of mathematics and statistics to help one more deeply understand social issues.
Statistics is shown to be anything but dry in this book, as using wit, intuition, and clarity, the author shows how statistical concepts relate to everyday life.
He is able to separate important ideas from overly technical details, hence the title, Naked Statistics. I took many of his approaches to heart in my teaching. Wheelan gives many examples of how using readily available data yields deep inferences about the world we live in.
Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called "sexy." From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you'll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
By
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
As a writer and historian, I’m all about rabbit holes. When something I’ve never heard about before catches my interest, I have to find out more—and sometimes I end up writing whole books on the subject! I have a head full of bizarre little nuggets of information, and I love reading books, like the ones here, that tell me something new and change my way of thinking.
A book on statistics that is interesting? Yes, actually. AndTheTigerthat Isn’tis more than just interesting, it’s useful. Maths was never my strong point at school, but even someone who never got the hang of quadratic equations can learn to ask useful questions when faced with bamboozlingly large numbers and dodgy ‘averages’.
This book offers a way to see through statistics that are used to conceal information as much as to reveal it. It’s worth reading just for the section on rice and random distribution. And the tiger in the title? It’s what happens when you think you see a pattern (in this case, stripes in the undergrowth), but there is no pattern at all.
Mathematics scares and depresses most of us, but politicians, journalists and everyone in power use numbers all the time to bamboozle us. Most maths is really simple - as easy as 2+2 in fact. Better still it can be understood without any jargon, any formulas - and in fact not even many numbers. Most of it is commonsense, and by using a few really simple principles one can quickly see when maths, statistics and numbers are being abused to play tricks - or create policies - which can waste millions of pounds. It is liberating to understand when numbers are…
