I found the maps of the birthplace of Chinese poets to be very interesting, and immediately it made me think about maybe the places of the highest concentration were linked to the most populous, the most educated, and the most powerful areas of China during the corresponding time periods. Of course, this connection between the birthplace of famous poets and where power in China was located at the time is not explicitly explained by Tufte, I just assumed this, but then later in the reading when he mentions making comparisons among geographic distributions of sea-goddess temples and birthplaces of Tang, Sung, Ming, and China poets” I immediately took notice and thought that any connections would be a correlation, not causation. Generally, I’m confused why he is trying to compare the two, but I see his point on how because that map was on a separate page, you cannot easily compare the map with the other four (which would be on the same two pages, even though in digital format, we cannot discern this difference). This discrepancy between comparing in a digital vs a physical format is interesting to me because, in the digital world, it is much easier to compare things if you want (assuming the format of what you are comparing is the same) since you can more easily manipulate the data visualizations by shrinking them so they fit on the same screen, by duplicating the book and then flipping each copy to different pages, etc. If this were a physical copy of the book, I couldn’t easily do the same thing - I would have to purchase or procure another physical copy of the book to compare, or I could rip out the pages (but even then, the maps would be on the same sheet, so I couldn’t view them at the same time).

I found the river and mountain comparison chart to be interesting, too. Like Tufte said, the lakes add a depth of meaning to the river chart. I’d also argue that it seems like there is more meaning in terms of knowing where the rivers start and end (what direction the river flows) as well as how wide the rivers are relatively, even if not to scale. The mountain comparisons are less successful to me, too because they are spaced too closely together, and it is difficult to read the corresponding labels. The mountains are also drawn the same way, even though in reality I know these mountains have unique shapes. This is truly an instance of an embellished bar graph - one that is difficult to read, too.