What is e-research?

I have been having a lot of trouble understanding the e-research component of this class mostly because I don't know what is meant by "e-research". As we touched on a tiny bit in class on Monday, I think of research as a process of using knowledge and resources in a way that generates new knowledge, furthering our understanding of a field and/or phenomena. In this context I would say that e-research involves the use and study of the internet as part of the generation of new knowledge of something offline. However, e-research could be research focused on the study of the internet to form new knowledge of something online. I may be completely off on both of these guesses, but that is my best understanding of e-research so far.

As far as utilizing e-research in our research project, I expect that we will look for online manifestations of our topic. We are looking into the accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care services for immigrants, so in conducting e-research, we could look for clues on Health care provider websites such as the availability of varied language options, and whether or not there are links to help pages for immigrants. We also plan to look into issues such as euthanasia and how this option is presented to immigrant populations. We can employ similar methods as above in order to see if information about euthanasia is made available to immigrants and if so, if it is portrayed differently than it is to the native population.