"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The world is awash with textual data. If you Google, Bing, or Yahoo how much of that data is unstructured, that is, in a textual format, estimates would range from 80 to 90 percent. The real number doesn't matter. What does matter is that a large proportion of the data is in a text format. The implication is that anyone seeking to find insights in that data must develop the capability to process and analyze text.
When I first started out as a market researcher, I used to manually pore through page after page of moderator-led focus groups and interviews with the hope of capturing some qualitative insight an Aha! moment if you will-and then haggle with fellow team members over whether they had the same insight or not. Then, you would always...