The relative effectiveness of the noncontiguous cartogram
The relative effectiveness of noncontiguous cartograms, in presenting data were tested over a continuum of tasks ranging from general to specific, using university students as subjects. A total of three tasks were examined, one task required subjects to judge cartograms showing a very general distribution, the second task required a moderate amount of information to be retrieved, and the third task required very specific information to be obtained from the cartogram. Two sets of non contiguous cartograms of the United States were used; one set had international and internal boundaries the second set had only international boundaries. In general students performed task one and two with a great deal of accuracy, proving non contiguous cartograms are a useful method of displaying geographic information. The third task was less successful than the first two, although this fact is not surprising, we learned that when displaying and trying to retrieve very specific kinds of information, the non contiguous cartogram is not a viable option.
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