Now approaching its third iteration, the Data Power Conference focuses on critical questions about the relationship between data and society, with conference speakers invited to address the social and cultural consequences of data's pervasiveness in our everyday lives. With this focus on emergent 'data relations' (Kennedy, 2016), the Data Power Special Issue brings a different slant to the advance of datafication and algorithmic processing than is commonly seen in regular issues of OIR. Papers were selected by the full conference team for their quality, as well as their relevance to the Information Science research community who make up the majority of the OIR readership.