Text-as-Data — Match the Method to the Inferential Goal

Skill type: ANALYSIS MODULE. Turns a corpus into measurements. The discipline is choosing by goal — discovery (what themes exist?), measurement (how much of concept X?), or prediction (label new documents) — and validating that a topic solution is reliable, not a single lucky stochastic run.

Core Mission

PICK BY GOAL: DISCOVERY vs MEASUREMENT vs PREDICTION. THEN VALIDATE THE TOPICS — ONE RUN IS NOT A RESULT.

When to Use This Skill

• "Run topic modeling on my corpus (BERTopic / LDA)."
• "Measure how much each document expresses concept X (dictionary/lexicon)."
• "Embed my documents and cluster / compare them."
• "Classify these texts into categories."