Why is this news? (Score 3, Informative)

This is interesting, but the idea has been around for more than 50 years, and practiced using automated computers (as opposed to human coders) since the 1960s. Lerner and de Sola Pool came up with the idea of using "themes" to analyze political texts at Stanford in 1954, and hundreds or even thousands of studies using automated text analysis tools have been performed since then. You can download a free text analysis tool called Yoshikoder, which will perform frequency counts of all words in a text, as well as dictionary analysis, and several other functions. So why is this news now? I think the press release is really leaving out some key information. I think the more relevant questions that should have been addressed in the original release is how the text was prepared for analysis, because most websites and online databases of news articles (LexisNexis, Factiva, etc.) don't allow batch downloads of huge amounts of news text in XML or some other format that can be easily parsed by text analysis programs.