The description of joint NEH/NSF Digging into Data competition (2009) organised by Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment of Humanities (the U.S. federal agency which funds humanities research) opens with these questions: "How does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitised data –far more than they could read in a lifetime – what does that mean for research?" A year later, an article in the New York Times (16 November 2010) stated: "The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data."