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Digital technology has shaped the way humans interact with information and create knowledge. These conditions have in turn shaped a generation of people who experienced virtual environments very early in their lives and are often referred to as digital natives. This group of people has a particular way of communicating and interacting. It characterizes their affinity spaces and the many experiences with virtual worlds and digital games. In digital games, the separation between entertainment and learning is becoming less pronounced. Many game titles have been used for educational purposes. An iconic example is Minecraft, which has been used formally in some schools to teach topics on the environment. However, studies on formal topics in Geography are conspicuously absent, and we therefore selected Minecraft to understand how digital natives learn about Geography given the character of its virtual environment. To this aim, we developed a learning task scenario for global climate zones. The scenario was tested in two pilot studies with two different groups of participants. The results indicate that participants already share some degree of knowledge about the game environment, despite differences within the digital native group. Using the results of several pilot studies, we discuss the design choices to engage players in the game’s learning activity.

The map of Moravia (1569) by the renowned Vienna scholar, Paulus Fabricius (ca. 1528-1589), is still considered to be the oldest known cartographic representation of Moravia. This paper focuses on the cartographic analysis of the map with the aim to identify possible methods of its construction with regard to some known circumstances of its origin. The author of the map mentions in the appended texts that he travelled through Moravia several times. The methodology of the work is based on selected spatial analyses of the positional and height aspects of displayed settlements. The achieved results are compared and discussed in the context of other information sources, especially the existing settlement structure and contemporary communication network. The conclusions reveal a correlation between the density of the depicted settlements and the proximity of a modelled communication network. The orographic conditions of Moravia have a significant influence on the map content. The plains are covered in detail, hilly lands and highlands are rarely and randomly mapped, whereas the mountains are not described at all. In the peripheral parts of the area of interest, the author probably worked only with data from travel itineraries. With regard to achieved results, it can be assumed that there is potential to apply the established procedures to the analysis of old maps of similar type. Unlike later maps, they are based on the author's travelling experiences and impressions, rather than on complex measurements of geographical coordinates.

The study evaluated the degree of comparability of human behaviour exhibited during an evacuation scenario conducted in two environments, one real and the other virtual. For this purpose, we created a precise 3D model (digital twin) of a real campus building. In both the experimental (virtual environment) and control (real environment) groups, the participants were all first-time visitors to the building. The groups were instructed to locate a target room where they would subsequently be required to complete a simple task, at which point an evacuation alarm would be set off. We evaluated three types of data collected during their quest to find a way out of the building: an eye-tracker logged gaze hits on various objects (e.g., navigation signs), recorded the locomotion and trajectory of the participants, and logged a combination of these parameters (e.g., points along the path where participants sighted certain objects). The sample was composed of 73 participants (35 for the real environment, 38 for the virtual environment). We analysed and confirmed the results and concluded that despite certain aspects of human behaviour differing during the simulated evacuation, the locomotion behaviour exhibited by the participants in both environments was generally comparable. To improve the potential use of these findings in practice, we selected easily accessible hardware and excluded expensive devices such as treadmills, etc.

The royal charters and chronicles present a unique historical source for researching power distribution and administration of the medieval kingdom. This paper presents an attempt to progress in the analytical approaches presented by German historians from the 1980s and 1990s to study the governance of the medieval kingdom. Inspired by the use of newly acquainted digital methods in humanities, we compare the analytical metrics implemented on the Přemysl Otakar II (1251-1278) activity itinerary dataset to study the identification of primary centers of his government. The data for the study were collected based on the historical research of available sources and transformed and cleaned into a data table of king's activities and a list of geocoded localities. To study the king's movement in spacetime, we also needed to reconstruct the travel routes and the corresponding travel time estimation. In the next step, we selected and implemented twelve metrics ranging from fundamental statistical analysis, and geostatistics, to network analysis to evaluate the dataset and identify the primary centers of the reign of the king. Further, we provided the comparison of all used metrics in the sense of visual analysis, methodological point of view, and from the perspective of their historical interpretation. In addition to providing a methodological extension to the research of historical itineraries, the outcomes of the analyses brought a new contribution to the historical research of the administration of the medieval kingdom.