the world today abounds in textual data. Words, SMSs, tweets, social media posts, verbal responses in questionnaires, these can all be treated as data. Some recoding will be necessary, since text is not numerical. Frequently occurring words can be counted, the lengths of sentences can be measured,
the number of words used just once can be identified, and so on, in order to create quantitative variables from text. Textual data have been used, for example, in identifying the author of threatening letters, in comparing political party manifestos, in classifying respondents in a survey who give answers to openended questions.