Is this Enlightenment?

Probably not, but its close enough to make me happy.

This week, I have continued my reading/research/sleeping, and have now realised that the material in the papers is relatively "limited". I say limited, in that many of the papers I have read contain very similar information which is only slightly different (it includes a different method of coarsening or it uses a different form of vertex placement, which has been used previously but not in this very specific context).

Of course there are the rare papers which show something new and useful, however, many papers that demonstrate a "new feature" are more specific to types of graphs or to different methods of viewing, and not directly useful. Having reached this point, I still have a mountain of papers to read having recently discovered that Google Scholar shows you where papers have been cited. (Instead of reading the papers in a reverse chronological order, I can now look forward at more modern papers).

Having read through and compared a large number of papers, I am beginning to make several decisions about which mechanisms and techniques I wish to use in my future work, and which not to use. There is still a long way to go before I make any real world changing plans, and future work is very much fragmented.

If I don't give another update tomorrow [Friday], you can make the safe assumption that next week, I will be returning to the wonderful world of journals, papers and gibberish they call 'knowledge'. If all goes well, I am planning to have a significant part of my draft literature review complete, but this may be me being over-ambitious. We will see, for now, goodbye and have a good weekend.