This week's class presented many interesting challenges as we began our first annotation assignment for Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. I found the process of annotation to be incredibly interesting and engaging. Through these annotations I was presented with a great opportunity to research and analyze the text in more detail than I otherwise would be. I was able to learn about the historical context of many of the themes presented throughout the text.

This week’s discussion about the images in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was really useful to me.  I have next to no experience interpreting images, so that was the thing I was most anxious about going into this course. I’ve spent years building my skills at interpreting and analyzing words, but doing so with images is a whole new world. It was really helpful sitting together as a class and working through the images together to see what purposes we thought each image served.

While working on the annotations today for A Christmas Carol I got to thinking specifcially about how much in text goes over the mind. When you read a text so many times your mind goes at a spead that if you brush over a word that is not fully familiar to you it does not phase your reading. The activity we did today allowed us to individually slowly analyze the text and grab further context on the victorian era. I felt that looking through the annotations made my peers I was so much more informed on certain phrases and meaning.

I found this week’s focus on John Leech’s artwork for A Christmas Carol flooded with social commentary. In our group discussion we analyzed an illustration of Mr.Fezziwig from Ebinezer Scrooge’s paranormal encounter with the ghost of his past. As we analyzed the steel plate etching, we noted the detailed images of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig for being more vibrant and “jovial” in contrast to the other characters around them.