The GlueX Experiment and Data Analysis

The GlueX experiment in Jefferson Lab's Hall D had its first full production run in spring of 2017, which reached a luminosity of 20 pb$^{-1}$ in the coherent peak of its 9 GeV polarized photon beam. The collaboration is working on its primary goal of exploring the light meson spectrum. The spring 2016 commissioning run already provided a wealth of data leading to a recent first publication on the $\rho$ beam spin asymmetry $\Sigma$. Further analysis of this dataset will be shown in this symposium. This talk will set the scene for the GlueX analysis presentations by describing the GlueX detector and photon beam production, the subdetector parts, and their performance. In addition, the coordinated production and analysis common to all studies will be described, and physics highlights to be discussed as part of the symposium will be presented.