I was watching a show the other day where they discussed their mapping of Benjamin Franklin's social network (who he communicated with, where they were in the w

I was watching a show the other day where they discussed their mapping of Benjamin Franklin's social network (who he communicated with, where they were in the world, etc). They showed some of the process and it appeared to involve some Excel workbooks with hundreds of sheets and terribly normalized data. I can only imagine the amount of work involved in trying to extract any sort of useful information from the raw data in that format. I run into stuff like this all the time. All I could think was that given a day and a Postgres+PostGIS server someone could have probably saved them entire man-months of their time...