Text is everywhere, and everything is text. More textual data than ever before are available to computational social scientists—be it in the form of digitized books, communication traces on social media platforms, or digital scientific articles. Researchers in academia and industry increasingly use text data to understand human behavior and to measure patterns in language. Techniques from natural language processing have created a fertile soil to perform these tasks and to make inferences based on text data on a large scale.

Last week marked a milestone for social science and industry partnerships, with Facebook announcing an initiative to give scholars access to its data in order to help them assess social media’s impact on elections.