Introduction to A Research Agenda for Digital Geographies

Abstract

The digital' has become deeply enmeshed within our everyday lives and society, so much so that the COVID-19 pandemic merely accelerated the move towards placing many aspects of our lives online. The inescapable nature of digitisation has, and will continue to have, major consequences on how we live, work, and learn. In all sectors of society, the tidal wave of digitisation creates significant dilemmas and challenges, as well as opportunities. We live in a world where watches and phones monitor our bodies (Neff and Nafus, 2016), increasing numbers of policies focus on 'digital citizens' (European Commission, 2020), while cities and corporations constantly watch and listen to everything that goes on around them (Degen and Rose, 2022;Lupton, 2016). In academia, the digital's pervasiveness has led to 'digital turns' with many avenues of inquiry developing from 'digital humanities' (Gold, 2012) and 'digital sociology' (Lupton, 2014) to 'digital chemistry' (Bird et al., 2015) and 'digital biology' (Morris et al., 2005). Geography has also been subject to a 'digital turn' (Ash et al., 2018) with digital geographies emerging as a flourishing area of research. What this does not tell us, however, is what digital geographies is and why it matters. The comparison to digital turns in other disciplines is striking here. In the sciences, appending 'digital' to the name of the discipline has in many ways become a shorthand for using big data and artificial intelligence (AI) modelling as a way to derive new insights into existing topic areas. These techniques are exceedingly exciting and already widely used by geographers, both those working in the physical and human sides of the discipline. Digital geographies is about much more than simply the use of big data, however. Digital geographers have always advocated for a research philosophy that 'opens out' the discipline of geography (Kinsley et al., 2020) whereby "the digital can expand geographical thinking and that geographical thinking can, in turn, enrich the emerging and ongoing theorisation of 'the digital'" (Digital