Text mining (aka natural language processing (nlp) or computational linguistics) is an umbrella term for a range of computational tools and statistical techniques that quantify text. The ability to transform unstructured text into valuable information offers news opportunities for many research areas.
In economics, empirical work is largely based on quantitative data like prices, demand, votes, etc. But a large amount of unstructured text is also generated in economic environments, e.g. company reports, policy committee deliberations, court decisions, media articles, political speeches, etc. Treating this text-data quantitatively is of increasing interest to economic research.
This website gives an overview about recent trends of text mining in economics.
An overview of the current status of my paper can be found here