My experience with Gephi, while not one full of cursing and outward frustration, was not entirely pleasant. I say it was not entirely pleasant because all-in-all, Gephi is a unique tool that--like Voyant Tools--opens new doors for me as we trudge through the semester and make our way to the deadline for our semester-long research project. I am happy to have been introduced to this tool, but being unfamiliar with the data loaded into it was most definitely a source of frustration for me. Had I compiled the data myself to load into this, that may have made the blind exploration process easier as I know how the data is supposed to look in certain situations.

The genre tags made little sense to me without context of how they were developed, but I'm sure made sense to whomever compiled them. I enjoyed playing around with the different types of graphs and applying different styles to the font, which makes me excited to try Gephi again with my own data. Something that was also interesting was reconfiguring the data to highlight different trends in the graph.

I loved exploring the statistical tools on Gephi, regardless of having no idea what the results implied with little knowledge of the original data. Gephi was definitely foreign to me, which is strange because I typically find myself as the pseudo-IT person in most situations as my professional work includes a focus in web devleopment. It made me uncomfortable having little control over what I was doing, but I enjoyed that discomfort and figuring out how to manipulate the graphs. I look forward to employing this tool again in the future with data that interests me.