Over the past 25 years, digital tools and technologies have made profound cultural and organisational changes in higher education. The ways that academics share their research findings through the structure and content of research papers, for example, has changed dramatically over this period.
Digital tools and technologies are also increasingly influential in framing the ways that academic work is shaped and informed by non-academic stakeholders, end-users, and members of the public. Debate in the public sphere, for example, led to calls for researchers to produce not only open access publications, but also associated open data, and accounts of research that are more accessible to non-academics. Digital tools and technologies have also begun to realise the potential for citizens to come together as communities of interest, distributed in time and space, to work cooperatively and collaboratively to produce new forms of knowledge.
Through this Research Topic, we welcome contributions that explore how digital tools and technologies are influencing the scholarship of application, by which we mean scholarship involving engagement with the wider world outside academia, but still based on the scholar’s disciplinary knowledge and background.
We are particularly interested in welcoming contributions that explore any of the following research areas (but we are not limited to):
• organisational and cultural changes in higher education and external agencies who engage with academics through digital forms;
• methodological issues in designing and evaluating forms of online participation, dialogue, and debate;
• technology-based strategies for open and/or engaged research;
• inclusivity and diversity in online engagement;
• analyses of activity in online citizen inquiry platforms;
• online interventions in the governance of emerging technologies;
• social media for openness and engagement;
• authenticity in research mediated through technology;
• ethics of online participation;
• forms of distributed governance mediated by technology;
• digital tools and strategies for enhancing creativity involving academics with non-academics;
• technology-based interventions to promote lifelong citizenship skills;
• quality assurance and/or reflective practices;
• power dynamics in relation to how academics engage with non-academics in digital spaces.
This Research Topic aims to include theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that offer multi-disciplinary perspectives on the digital scholarship of application. It aims to report recent advances in digital humanities, social sciences, education, science communication, public engagement with research, sociology, and participatory design. Attention will be paid to analyses that cross-fertilize these fields.
Keywords: engagement, open research, social science, social networks, social media, digital media, digital ethnography, digital skills, expertise, ethics, inclusivity, evaluation, power, technology-enhanced participation
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
