This site is based on research in data genealogy that has been previously published in:

• Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Additional publications in data genealogy informing this site include:

• Colin Koopman, "Artificing Intelligence: from Isolating IQ to Amoral AI," in AI & Society, v40 (2025): 3149-3161. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02080-1]
• Colin Koopman, “The Political Theory of Data: Institutions, Algorithms, and Formats in Racial Redlining," in Political Theory, v50n2 (2021): 337-361.  [https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211027835]
• Critical Genealogies Collaboratory (coauthored by Colin Koopman, Patrick Jones, Valérie Simon, Paul Showler, and Mary McLevey), “When Data Drive Health: An Archaeology of Medical Records Technology," in BioSocieties (2021).  [https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-021-00249-1]
• Colin Koopman, "Coding the Self: The Infopolitics and Biopolitics of Genetic Sciences," in The Hastings Center Report, v50n3 (2020): S6-S14 [https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1150]
• Colin Koopman, "Information Before Information Theory: The Politics of Data Beyond the Perspective of Communication," in New Media & Society, v21n6 (2019): 1326-1343.  [https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818820300]
• Critical Genealogies Collaboratory (coauthored by Colin Koopman, Bonnie Sheehey, Patrick Jones, Laura Smithers, Sarah Hamid, and Claire Pickard), “Standard Forms of Power: Biopower and Sovereign Power in the Technology of the US Birth Certificate, 1903–1935,” Constellations 25, no. 4 (Dec. 2018): 641–56.  [https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12372]

Work in data egalitarianism (based upon a pragmatist reconstructive approach to technological hierarchy) informs this site, and is further developed in:

• Colin Koopman, Data Equals: Democatic Equality and Technological Hierarchy (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

See additional recent work in:

• Asher Caplan and Colin Koopman, "The Ethics of Data Interoperability: Mapping Problems and Strategies in Biomedical Data and Beyond," in Big Data & Society, Online First, June 2025. [https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251352815]  

Our Data, Our Selves is informed informed by two theoretical methodologies: philosophical genealogy and philosophical pragmatism.

• Genealogy (a historical-philosophical methodology for diagnostic inquiry) is developed in Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2013).
  • This work builds on writings by Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Paul Rabinow, Arnold Davidson, Bernard Williams, & others. The collaborative support of the Critical Genealogies Workshop and Critical Genealogies Collaboratory remains an additional source of inspiration.
• Pragmatism (a normative methodology for reconstructing destabilized social formations) is developed in Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (Columbia University Press, 2009).
  • This work builds on writings by William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, & others. Important for subsequent work on pragmatism after the book above are the writings and data research projects of W.E.B. Du Bois.