Changing realities, changing methods: digital research methods

It is hard to believe that the internet was founded roughly sixty years ago. With the advent of the internet came new vocabulary: big data, social networks, data smog, data traces, data collaboratives, telehealth, tele mental health, cloud computing and countless other new ideas. Simultaneously with the rise of these new data sources inanimate objects became smarter, we’ve birthed: smart cities, smart cars, smart phones, smart watches, and smart homes; with surely other new smarter objects in the near future. The technology sector has is also moving forward with virtual and augmented reality for everything from training employees to gaming as well as new developments in artificial intelligence. This new ecosystem requires expanding and developing existing theories and methods as well as creating new methods for exploring the impacts of these new tools on individuals, organizations and communities. The internet, social networks and smart phones, now embedded in day to day life both generate data, providing new data sources as well as offering new methods of data collection, analysis and interpretation. A commensurate collection of research methods is developing in order to make sense of these new phenomenon, e-Research is a generic term, coined to describe innovations in research methods that are emerging to take advantage of this new and vastly more powerful digital eco-system. Key features of these next generation of distributed digital technologies are the development of interoperable, scalable computational tools that make it possible for researchers to locate, access, share, aggregate, manipulate and visualize digital data seamlessly across the Internet on a scale previously unimaginable. This first issue of 2020, volume 39 (1) features four articles exploring e-Research or digital research methods for enhancing and expanding our collective understanding of how to maximize our research potentials within and allied to these new systems. In this issue we feature: