Entering into the second week of the course I was excited to begin studying the content and analyzing these victorian era illustrations. Following the lecture and the course readings for this week there were a number of things that I found to be both incredibly interesting and challenging. Firstly with regard to the course readings, I found it difficult to fully understand the male/female relationship between text and image as it was described in the article. The comparison between sexuality and illustrated books was one that I was not fully prepared for heading into this module. However, as I worked through the readings I will say that I found the idea to be incredibly fascinating particularly the part about bitextual relationships within text. Furthermore many of the confusing aspects of the readings were made clear during the lecture portion of today's class. I look forward to exploring more theories that offer new perspectives on the relationship between image and text. Furthermore in this week's lecture we were assigned a group project through zoom to create a timeline entry for one the texts we will be studying in class. I found this to be very helpful on many fronts. It allowed me to work with other members of the class and allowed me to become more acquainted with the COVE system as well as the style of work we will be conducting moving forward. Furthermore it allowed me to gain some insight into the texts themselves and which of them I may want to research in more depth. The introduction to research tools like Victorian Web also proved to be an invaluable resource that I will be sure to use in the future. 

Simon Mancuso