"What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon. As it has been very ingeniously remarked"
- Napoleon Bonaparte
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. It matters that a large proportion of the data is in 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 group and interview transcripts 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...
