Text is everywhere, and everything is text. More textual data than ever before are available to computational social scientists—be it in the form of digitized books, communication traces on social media platforms, or digital scientific articles. Researchers in academia and industry increasingly use text data to understand human behavior and to measure patterns in language. Techniques from natural language processing have created a fertile soil to perform these tasks and to make inferences based on text data on a large scale.

We were extremely lucky to kick off the first edition of the SAGE Ocean Speaker Series last week with a talk from tech attorney and social media law professor, Kimberly A. Houser.