Text analytics, applied to social, online, and enterprise data, aims to extract useful information and create usable insights for business, personal, government, and research ends. The technology is pervasive, even if not ubiquitous, which is to say that it is deployed in applications ranging in scale from device-installed to distributed, “total information awareness” data mining. Text analytics is utilized wherever big/fast text is found. And while not every analytical application directly involves text, in our emerging big-data world, every task – including analyses of “machine data” and transactional records – may be enriched by the inclusion of text-sourced information.