I went to a very interesting Yale lecture yesterday by Tony Hey from Microsoft Research talking about the revolution of research needing to deal with the overwhelming amount of data. 

The 4 Research Paradigms Throughout History

1. Thousand years ago –  
Experimental Science – Description of natural phenomena

2. Last few hundred years –
Theoretical Science – Newton’s Laws, Maxwell’s Equations

3. Last few decades –
Computational Science – Simulation of complex phenomena

4. Today – 
Data-Intensive Science – Scientists overwhelmed with data sets require a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.

The key is moving data to knowledge
DATA –> INFORMATION –> KNOWLEDGE

A few -interesting applications of this are:
NodeXL http://nodexl.codeplex.com/
Zoom Technology (Example Roman History)

Other resources:
Interesting article in NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/science/15books.html?_r=3
List of Tools: 
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/tools/