@chrisdtc101
Searching “locative art” on wikipedia redirected me to “locative media”. Wikipedia described locative media as, “digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions” and while it contained several paragraphs talking about a description, creative representations, interactive technologies, and examples, the website did not seem to define locative media very well. Wikipedia is open for just about anyone to edit and share information so while it may have some information, I wouldn’t trust it as much as most other websites.
I searched for “locative art” on the Leonardo Electronic Almanac after I looked on wikipedia. I had never heard of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, so I didn’t know what to expect when I typed it into google and loaded the website. When I typed “locative art” into the search bar, the Almanac brought up a list of articles that talked about or included the phrase “locative art” in the text. Many of the links brought up were from the Almanac’s published volumes and I never saw an actual definition of locative art on this website. While it seemed to have a lot of articles that may have talked about it, it would have required more work to sift through all the information and find what I wanted.
While the Leonardo Electronic Almanac gave me 27 results for “locative media”, searching for the phrase in Worldcat gave me over 600,000 results. These results were largely made up of books and peer-reviewed articles, although I never saw the term “locative art” in any of the titles I looked at. The articles and books seemed to cover a wide range of topics from “Financial comparisons of the artisanal fisheries…” to “The Oxford companion to Christian art and architecture”. I highly doubt that all these results contained information on what I was looking for, and the website simply brought up anything including that worlds that I had typed into the search bar. Since Worldcat is an online library that “connects you to the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide”, it is going to include millions of texts and can give you both massive amounts of information while also providing reliable and peer-reviewed texts if you need them.
None of these websites really told me what locative art was, and wikipedia surprisingly got closer to a definition than the other two websites. This really showed me that these websites are designed for different things and providing different information. You can’t go to Worldcat looking for the definition of a phrase and you can’t go to wikipedia looking for peer-reviewed sources on a topic.