After reading both pieces by Lou Burnard and Amanda Gailey, I’m especially interested in Burnard’s contention that “text encoding provides us with a single semiotic system for expressing the huge variety of scholarly knowledge,” and in the ways in which both authors suggest that TEI could be used to describe (or, in certain cases, might fail to adequately describe) images. Gailey’s discussion of the illustration of an owl, crow, and jaybird in Harris’s “On the Plantation” provides a helpful example of this. Gailey notes that the illustration is likely the first use of the idiom “naked as a jaybird,” but that this phrase is conveyed through the image of the jaybird juxtaposed with an overdressed crow and owl, and not mentioned in text. In the case of the naked jaybird, Gailey’s editorial intervention is necessary to properly describe the jaybird image so that it becomes searchable. Gailey’s example brought up a few questions for me: what can be communicated and what is lost in the process of describing images for textual encoding? how might description supplement the image itself? Because my own work centers around the relationship textual description and pictorial representation, I’m excited to learn and think more about the ambiguity and interpretive possibilities of describing texts (and images) as a central part of digital editing.