Big data gets big help: Law and policy literacies for text data mining

A wealth of digital texts and the proliferation of automated research methodologies enable researchers to analyze large sets of data at a speed that would be impossible to achieve through manual review. When researchers use these automated techniques and methods for identifying, extracting, and analyzing patterns, trends, and relationships across large volumes of un- or thinly structured digital content, they are applying a methodology called text data mining or TDM. TDM is also referred to, with slightly different emphases, as “computational text analysis” or “content mining.”