Measuring Navigational Map Reading Competencies: A Pilot Study with a location-based GeoGame

Navigational map reading (NMR) is relevant to people’s everyday life, in professional contexts, and in school education. Being interested in fostering children’s NMR competencies implies a test instrument for measuring potential learning progress. Related literature lacks an evaluated test for children that is focused on the spatial aspects of NMR and applicable at different locations. This paper fills this gap by presenting OriGami NMR Test – a test for measuring NMR competencies in children that is implemented in a digital geogame and played with a mobile device in the real-world. In order to enable a transfer of the test to different locations, we offer the reader the general concept of the test, the geogame, as well as a script that automatically scores the participants’ test performances and evaluates the test items for the specific location. In a pilot study, we successfully realized and evaluated the test for two different locations.

Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route

The way we perform identity in everyday situations nowadays is affected in very concrete ways by our interactions with technology. However, our conceptual understanding of such exchanges has been limited to a handful of concepts or narrative devices (i.e. a cyborg), which have proved their limits when facing extreme complexity. This paper develops a proposal to reexamine various possible assemblages between man and machine – at the level of the self-awareness and self-signifying of an individual vis à vis technological-based entities – by revisiting Greimas’s semiotic square, a tool from classical structural semiotics that could be readjusted to unfold what is at stake in that relationship, and under the semantic category of identity. The paper explains the constituent terms of Greimas’s elementary structure of meaning, unfolds the logic of his semiotic square, and develops some of its key underlying notions. Moreover, the limitations of the semiotic square are also surveyed. Instead of trying to pose a new paradigm, this paper wants to explore its heuristic possibilities and resist any claims of the underlying theory to produce fix typologies, semantic determinisms or stable discursive forms. In that sense, the scope of this essay is not to identify the whole array of cases in which identity is formed out of the contact between man and his machinical other, but to deliver a working scheme that may function as an initial, navigational map, a tool by which we can further explore the idea of how identity is affected by technology as a dynamic, performative process, therefore informing a semantic know-how and granting further access to yet unfamiliar fields of a post-human condition.

"Tabvla Sinvs Venetici" W. Barentsa i njeno povijesnozemljopisno značenje

Two variants of navigational map of the Adriatic made by the Dutch seaman and polarexplorer Willem Barents are known in the scientific literature. The first one, in this article marked K-1, was worked out and printed in Amsterdam in 1595. Its primary function was practical-related to navigation. Opposite to it, K-2, which we date 1595 (1637-1662), was used as the geostrategical map of the Adriatic and the southern parts of Europe. Namely, owing to the Turkish penetrations since the middle of the 16th century, essential military and political changes occured on the northern coasts of the Adriatic sea and specially in their hinterlands. Just such a map was in want in "Atlases" of Jan (Johann, Ioannes) Janssonius (1588-1664) which were printed several times also in Ammsterdam but in the period from 1637 to 1662. Barents’ K-1, which was at Janssonius’ disposal, could fulfil this function. So Janssonius made only the most indispensable changes in accordance with the cartography of the first half of the 17th century and printed it. In this way K-2 lost its primarily practical-navigational function and assumed the characteristics of a map with essential strategical elements. This article deals with these fundamental questions of K-1 and K-2.

Strategies of Young Pigeons during ‘Map’ Learning

The routes of young, inexperienced pigeons released at four sites up to 13·5 km from the loft were recorded with GPS-based tracking devices. The routes were found to differ from those of old, experienced pigeons in several aspects: (1) Although being oriented when departing, young birds show more scatter and larger deviations from the home direction, but usually restrict their flights to a semicircle. (2) They apparently ignore prominent landmarks near the loft that are clearly visible. (3) Their tracks are typically more complex, consisting of a number of distinctive phases where the young birds head in different directions, which results in significantly longer routes, often exceeding the direct home distances more than four times. (4) At the same time, young birds seldom venture further away from the release site than the direct distance to home. Their behaviour can be interpreted as exploration to obtain new information on the distribution of navigational factors to be included in their still rudimentary navigational ‘map’. At the same time, their flights seem to include elements of safety, like anchoring the flights around the release site and a sense of distance, which help to reduce the chance of getting lost.