Books I’m Reading
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m doing a bunch of reading-like-a-grad-student* this spring to try to get my head around the current state of online places and ways to be together and work together. A few people asked for a reading list, so I’ve pulled the books together—my stack of papers and articles is pushing 350 items and I don’t have time to winnow it down yet, but I’ll get there. (Also I’m sure I’ve forgotten books, this is literally just what I could gather up in my hands/on my devices.)
This is a snapshot of what I’m looking at, not a set of recommendations. Some of these books are much better than others. (About half of these are rereads.)
books aimed at practitioners (mostly not recently published)
- Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience, Crumlish and Malone
- Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, Amy Jo Kim
- Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, Kraut and Resnick
- Designing for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places, Derek Powazek
- Online Communities : Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, Jenny Preece
- Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, Wenger, White, and Smith
framework reading
- Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism, Chermayeff and Alexander
- The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
- Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown
- A Pattern Language, Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein
- Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Elinor Ostrom
- Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, eds. Hess and Ostrom
- The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin
- The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map
- How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
- Thinking In Systems, Donella Meadows
- Fields, Factories, and Workshops, Peter Kropotkin
the rest
- Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media, Tarleton Gillespie
- Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky
- Lurking: How a Person Became a User, Joanne McNeil
- The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold
- The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life, Christian Crumlish
- The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community, Katie Hafner
- The Rise of Virtual Communities: In Conversation with Virtual World Pioneers, Amber Atherton
- Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, Charlton McIllwain
- The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Astra Taylor
- Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Sasha Costanza-Chock
- In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe
- New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, James Bridle
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff
- The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age, Danielle Citron
- Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture, Andrew Hinton
- Building Web Reputation Systems, Farmer and Glass
- Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures, Christina Dunbar-Hester
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Ruha Benjamin
- Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield
- Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, Nadia Eghbal
- Design for Safety, Eva Penzeymoog
- Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution, Douglas Schuler
- Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Noble
- The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects, Andrew Chen
- The Production of Houses, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, all four volumes of The Nature of Order, Alexander and co.
- The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, Grace Lee Boggs
- The Religion of Technology, David Noble
- Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons, ed. Hudson, Rosenbloom, and Cole
- My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, Julien Dibbell
* In honor of the hours I am spending virtuously not playing Tears of the Kingdom, grad-student mode for me rn is pretty much shaking trees, grabbing apples, snatching birds’ eggs, bagging weird emus, and hoarding sticks. In June, we cook. (And kill monsters.)