Computational linguistics and computer scientists are hard at work developing tools and techniques to automate text analysis. Content analysis has always been a major tool for sociologists, and these techniques have the potential to put sociology on the edge of a major upheaval in the way we do content analysis. Translating the complex algorithms used by computer scientists, and the statistical assumptions about language behind these algorithms, for use in sociology, however, requires careful methodological thought. I am working on a few projects to help sociologists apply automated text analysis techniques to sociological analysis in a methodologically rigorous fashion.