For today’s class we were tasked with annotating Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and working with John Leech’s illustrations for the novella. I found it surprising to learn that illustrations were included with the book when it was first published. This adds to the importance of looking at image, text and context in relation to each other. It was also interesting to learn about the different types of drawings Leech created for the novella and discuss as a class the impact of these illustrations. Who knew that there was so much detailed information online just about the illustrations! When it came time to annotating the text, I found it easy to write about the craft of the story because I’ve spent so much time practicing this type of analysis in school that it was easy to comment. As for the content annotation, I found it a little more challenging because it meant looking for detail within the text to highlight that would require pursuing further research to truly understand the context of a word or phrase Dickens used in A Christmas Carol. Using COVE also made this experience insightful as I got to read what my peers annotated within the text as well.