Social scientists are increasingly turning to computer-assisted text analysis as a way of understanding the digital footprints left by communities and individuals. Much of the technology that powers these approaches is borrowed from the fields of computer science and statistics; yet, social scientists have substantially different goals. We focus on the development of methods that support three core tasks: discovery, measurement and causal inference with text. We introduce the Structural Topic Model (STM), a bayesian generative model of text which…