Irtual reality (VR), as an informative medium, possesses the potential to engage students with immersive, interactive, and informative experiences. When presented in VR, immersive virtual environments (IVEs) can provide three-dimensional visual simulations that can be used to inform students about concepts in specific contexts that would be near impossible to achieve with more traditional teaching methodologies. It is proposed that existing learning frameworks can benefit from exploring the modalities of interaction that are presently afforded via VR from the experiential perspectives of the students. An evaluation is presented that focused on the appraisal of student experiences of immersive technologies as applied in a higher education context, specifically in the use of VR for the exploration of geomorphology theory by physical geography students. This research supports further development of the immersive learning discipline from three different perspectives. First, an empathy mapping method was applied to visualize student experiences and externalize our observed knowledge of student users for creating a shared understanding of their needs and to aid in lesson planning decision making when using VR in the classroom. Second, student experiences were captured using a technology-focused user experience questionnaire to obtain student attitudes immediately post-task. Finally, to assist teachers with the creation of a student-centered lesson plans that incorporate VR in the classroom, eight heuristic guidelines (focus, provocation, stimulation, collaboration, control, digital life, learner skills, multimodal experience) were developed. It is proposed that these findings can be used to provide support for the use of mixed reality and immersive virtual environments in learning that encompass the challenges faced by students and the interdisciplinary education community at large.

City dashboards have become a common smart city technology, emerging as a key means of sharing and visualising urban data for the benefit of the public and city administrations. Operating as the front-end of many cities’ data stores, dashboards display and benchmark indicators relating to city operations, characteristics, and trends, displayed through interactive visual representations of spatial and temporal patterns. Many dashboards collect, archive, and present data collected in real-time, as well as more traditional time-sliced administrative data. In this paper, we evaluate the techniques that dashboards employ to present real-time data to dashboard users. Our analysis identifies two factors that shape and differentiate real-time visual analytic tools: the dynamic nature of the data, how they are refreshed, and how the realtimeness of the data is communicated to the user; and how the tool enables archival comparison. We assess dashboard design according to the strategies used to address specific challenges associated with each factor, specifically change blindness and temporal pattern detection. We conclude by proposing effective techniques for city dashboard design.

Pattern analysis techniques currently common within geography tend to focus either on characterizing patterns of spatial and/or temporal recurrence of a single event type (e.g., incidence of flu cases) or on comparing sequences of a limited number of event types where relationships between events are already represented in the data (e.g., movement patterns). The availability of large amounts of multivariate spatiotemporal data, however, requires new methods for pattern analysis. Here, we present a technique for finding associations among many different event types where the associations among these varying event types are not explicitly represented in the data or known in advance. This pattern discovery method, known as T-pattern analysis, was first developed within the field of psychology for the purpose of finding patterns in personal interactions. We have adapted and extended the T-pattern method to take the unique characteristics of geographic data into account and implemented it within a geovisualization toolkit for an integrated computational-geovisual environment we call STempo. To demonstrate how T-pattern analysis can be employed in geographic research for discovering patterns in complex spatiotemporal data, we describe a case study featuring events from news reports about Yemen during the Arab Spring of 2011–2012. Using supplementary data from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, we briefly summarize and reference a separate validation study, then evaluate the scalability of the T-pattern approach. We conclude with ideas for further extensions of the T-pattern technique to increase its utility for spatiotemporal analysis.

Temporal patterns indicate consistency and change, providing insight into social processes and phenomena. This article contributes to understanding patterns in social science by confirming the existence of known patterns under new conditions and quantifying the amount of observed deviation. We introduce a technique for matching a pattern in real-world events using an extension to the sequence alignment algorithm developed in biology. We demonstrate our algorithm and its utility for social science applications using event data collected from RSS news feeds. By comparing patterns derived from events in Yemen during the Arab Spring of 2011–2012 to events in Yemen's history and to other countries during the same time period, this algorithm contributes to time geographic concepts and comparative political research.

Digital media merges disparate places, communities, and topics in reporting about current events, with both local and international impacts. This study maps the semantic spaces of reporting on Catalonia’s independence movement in 2015 onto geographic space, forming a “mediascape” of interwoven themes and places. It uses topic modeling to determine semantic themes and geographic information retrieval to map the geographies of those themes. A global pattern of distance decay from Barcelona, the center of the Catalonian independence movement, is apparent. This study also compares the particular media themes of professional sport, which is a globalizing force in Catalonia’s geopolitical narrative, and the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. It examines the particular geographies that appear in news articles pertaining to each theme. Contrasting the geographies of Catalonian independence and its relation to soccer and Scottish independence through the media produces a spatial–semantic illustration of how mediascapes form from and influence global geopolitical connections.