Category Archives: Student Blogs

It seems to me that each site provides its own interpretation. Wikipedia categorized the term into “Locative Media” as opposed to Locative Art.  Meanwhile, the Leonardo site simple gives me articles to choose from that relate to the topic. I think it must be a keyword search, looking for articles that contain that certain keyword. The WorldCat site gives me a bunch of books/ebooks/articles to choose from. These are most likely based on keywords as well, sorted by relevancy or amount of repeated keywords in the reading. The differences are that they each seem to have different sources. This means that I could never find a 100% sure reading about the topic because there seem to be so many out there. I think that the WorldCat offers the most credible sources, followed by Leonardo and then by wiki. WorldCat offers the most amount of citations and information about each article, giving me the feeling that I can’t really go wrong there. Leonardo seems to be legit, maybe because of the dot org domain name. These are usually reserved for more legit articles. Wiki of course gives me a very straightforward answer with hardly any extra readings. But, this information cannot be credible because anyone can go online and change it. I’ve learned throughout my days that I must always get a proper citation for a reading, or risk plaguerism or incorrect information.  Most of my researching these days is limited to WorldCat and other dot org sites, with Wikipedia sometimes being the initial point where I gather a sense of a topic.

@ObergJustin

After searching the term “locative art” I discovered there were many differences between the different search sites. Each search site was different in its credibility and usefulness. Searching the term locative art on Wikipedia gave me a very quick, down and dirty definition of what locative media is in general. Now where Wikipedia is the least credible of the sources because it can be easily edited by anyone, it does seem to be a good launching off point because the page gives you a general definition that you can wrap your mind around and provides many links to more reputable sources on the subject. Searching the Leonardo Electronic Almanac was interesting. The LEA seems credible since it is the collaborative effort of many universities including MIT and centers around art, science and technology. However, the information it provides was a little cluttered for my taste and was definitely not as easy to find as on Wikipedia. It took me awhile to find an article dealing specifically with locative art and even longer to find a definition on the term. The same was with World Cat, which even though it is a trusted credible source of articles run by WSU, it took significantly longer to find a relevant article and a definition specifically about locative art. This trade off of ease of access and credibility seems to be the norm online. If you want to find an article that is both useful and credible, be prepared to spend time digging through trusted yet non-optimized databases of articles.

@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.

@cougar_sean

As defined by Wikipedia, our first source, “locative media concentrates on social interaction with a place and with technology. Many locative media projects have a social, critical or personal (memory) background.” Here, we learn that although the media may not be strictly contained within one location, the content of that medium is. Through the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), we find that “interactivity plays into the relation between humans, technology and social space” (paragraph two). WorldCat from WSUV brings yet another set of articles and perspectives. “Jason Farman demonstrates how the worldwide adoption of mobile technologies is causing a reexamination of the core ideas about what it means to live our everyday lives” (Mobile Interface Theory).  Now overall, Wikipedia offers the most direct and simplified information, which is great to glance over and obtain main ideas. However, the LEA is more credible because it offers contact information for article authors and even provides a place to enter their degree level. That way, someone could search for articles written specifically by university professors with a PhD. Wikipedia on the other hand has multiple authors and no contact information for any of them. Although it is technically peer-reviewed, we are given absolutely no credentials for the authors. WorldCat has a multitude of articles (although relevance may be questionable). WorldCat is a university-run database full of the most reliable sources that can be found. These are largely peer-reviewed scholarly articles and there is plenty of background information so that researches can check the source for credibility.