There is no time like now to do text analysis – we have an abundance of easily available data, powerful and free open source tools to conduct our analysis, and research on machine learning, computational linguistics and computing with text is progressing at a pace we have not seen before.
In this chapter, we will go into details about what exactly text analysis is and look at the motivations for studying and understanding text analysis. Following are the topics we will cover in this chapter:
- What is text analysis?
- Where's the data at?
- Garbage in, garbage out
- Why should YOU be interested?
- References
A note about the references: they will appear throughout the PDF version of the book as links, and if it is an academic reference it will link to the PDF of the reference or the journal page. All of these links and references are then displayed as the final section of the chapter, so offline readers can also visit the websites or research papers.
