2012 In the first decade of the 21 st century, the researchers in the humanities and humanistic social sciences have gradually started to adopt computational and visualization tools. The majority of this work often referred as "digital humanities" has focused on textual data (e.g., literature, historical records, or social media) and spatial data (e.g., locations of people, places, or events visualization and computational analysis of large collections of images and video suitable for researchers in media studies, the humanities, and the social sciences who do not have technical background, and to apply these techniques to progressively large media data sets. Our second goal was theoretical -to examine existing practices and assumptions of visualization and computational data analysis (thus the name "Software Studies"), and articulate new research questions enabled by humanistic computational work with "big cultural data" in general, and visual media specifically. 3 This chapter draws on the number of my articles written since we started the lab where I discuss history of visualization, the techniques that we developed for visualizing large sets of visual media, and their applications to various types of media. 4 The reader is advised to consult these 1 For recent discussions of digital humanities, see David M
