Set out below, you will find some suggested readings that will prove helpful to you in preparing for your arrival at LSE, and for finding out about courses you may be interested in taking.
It is not essential that you read everything on the list - the intention is simply to give you an idea of the level and range of material covered.
Books and Open Source Academic Articles
Boyd Danah & Crawford K., 2012. Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), pp.662–679.
Cohen, J. 2012. Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gitelman, L, Ed. 2013. “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Goldstein, B. and L. Dyson. 2013. Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Information. Code for America.
Kitchin R. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and their Consequences. London: Sage.
Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist.| New York: Union Books.
Mosco V. (2014) To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World: Boulder, CO; Paradigm Publishers.
Schneier, B. Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. New York: Norton.
Mayer-Shoenberger, V. and K. Cukier. 2013. Big Data: A Revolution that will Transform how we Live, Work and Think. London: John Murray.
Tufekci, Z, 2014, Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics , First Monday, Volume 19, Number 7
Vaidhyanathan S., 2011. The Googlization of everything (and why we should worry), Berkeley: University of California Press.
van Dijck, José. 2013.The culture of connectivity. A critical history of social media. New York, Oxford University Press
van Dijck , José, 2013. Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology, Surveillance & Society 12(2).|
Also look at the Big Data and Society journal, open source journal available at: http://bds.sagepub.com/|.
Reports
AAPOR Task Force Report on Big Data 2015|, American Association for Public Opinion Research
The Data Revolution: Finding the Missing Millions|, 2015, Overseas Development Institute, London.
The Social, Cultural and Ethical Dimensions of "Big Data",| summary of an event by Data & Society Research Institute, New York City, March 2014.
Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values|. A report from the White House, May 2014.
Big data and positive social change in the developing world: a white paper for practitioners and researchers|. Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre conference papers?, May 2014.
UN Global Pulse. (2012)Big Data for Development: Challenges & Opportunities|. New York: UN Global Pulse.
For a recent WEF business perspective see http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalInformationTechnology_Report_2014.pdf|