Early 21st century media researchers have access to unprecedented amounts of media – more than they can possibly study, let alone simply watch or even search. A number of interconnected developments which took place between 1990 and 2010 – digitization of analog media collections, decrease in prices and expanding capacities of portable computer-based media devices (laptops, tablets, phones, cameras, etc.), the rise of user-generated content and social media, and globalization which increased the number of agents and institutions producing media around the world – led to exponential increase in quantity of media while simultaneously making it much easier to find, share, teach with, and research. Millions of hours of television programs already digitized by various national libraries and media museums, million pages of digitized newspaper pages from 19th and 20th century (http://www.chroniclingamerica.loc.gov), 150 billion snapshots of web pages covering the period from 1996 until today (http://www.archive.org), and hundreds of billions of videos on YouTube and photographs on Facebook (according to the stats provided by Facebook in the summer 2011, every day users upload 100 million images) and numerous other media sources are waiting to be “digged” into. (For more examples of large media collections, see the list of repositories made available to the participants of Digging Into Data 2011 Competition.) || from > Lev Manovich. "Media Visualization: Visual Techniques for Exploring Large Media Collections." In Media Studies Futures, ed. Kelly Gates. Blackwell, forthcoming 2012. || to download ad read the article please visit > http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2009/06/publications.html