Reading Response 6

In  Richard Saul Wurman's "The Business of Understanding", he explains his LATCH principle.  According to Wurman, there are only five ways to organize any type of information: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy -- forming LATCH.  I decided to pick the WikiTravel article on Jamestown, Rhode Island to see if WikiTravel abides by Wurman's LATCH rule.

After reading and analyzing the Jamestown WikiTravel page, I can safely say the author loosely abided by some of Wurman's LATCH principles -- mainly Time, Hierarchy, and Category.  The page (which can be viewed here) is sorted into ten major sections: Understand, Get in, Get around, See, Do, Buy, Eat, Drink, Sleep, and Get out. Although they are separated into different Categories, the organization of topics mainly abides by Hierarchy and Time.  It displays Hierarchy in the sense that the major underlying premises are put first in the Understand section.   Perhaps this is not the most definitive example of using Hierarchy to organize, but it is one of the only times the author uses the LATCH principles.  The rest of the topics are, loosely, ordered by time: Get in is first, Get out is last.  Eat, where they discuss popular restaurants, is put before Drink, where they point out popular night locations, and then Sleep, where they list the hotels, is left for the end.  The topics are based on Time and what one would do in a day.

There are many opportunities for the authors to utilize the LATCH principles where they do not.  For example, none of the events, museums, eateries, or hotels are listed in alphabetical order.  Alphabetical order would be best for the museums, eateries, and hotels, but in my personal opinion, Time would be the best regulator for the order of events.  If the events were organized by their time during the year, the list would be a very useful resource for travellers viewing the page.  Because of the small size of the Island, Location is a relatively un-useful means to organize any of the information, because, in reality, all the events and places are located within five miles of eachother.  Major improvements could be made to the page's organization by using the Alphabet and Time principles more effectively.