Editorial: The promised land of digital technology - a spatial perspective
Editorial: The promised land of digital technology - a spatial perspective

Summary/Abstract: Digital technology is nowadays everywhere. Its technological and computational power is almost beyond imagination. An interesting illustration can be found in the ‘infinite monkey theorem’ (Borel, 1913; Marsaglia & Zaman, 1993). If you give a monkey a laptop and if the monkey randomly hits the keys of the keyboard during an infinite time period, it will in the very long run with 100 percent certainty type any existing text that has a finite number of words. As an illustration, the present preface to this special issue of the Eastern Journal of European Studies (EJES), which was drafted by the guest editors of this special issue of EJES as an original and unique piece of work, can, in the long run, be reproduced by any monkey, provided we wait long enough. Clearly, if we would have a million mutually independent monkeys, this process would go much faster! The computational – and combinational – capacity of modern computers is indeed formidable. At the same time, this miraculous potential prompts many questions, of both an applied and ethical nature, in scientific research, but also in planning and policy-making. Such intriguing issues are addressed in this special issue, which is devoted to the theme of “The Nexus of Digital Technology Applications, Spatial Data Analytics, and Policy Regulations”. The successive articles in this issue zoom in on the high expectations and performance, but also on the severe limitations of the use of digital technology in spatial planning.

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