From time to time, I hear from researchers – from graduate students to economists working in industry to established tenured professors—interested in applying natural language processing tools in the context of serious, rigorous economics. The questions are usually multiple and combine gently personal inquiries (Whatever inspired you to pursue these two skill sets that are frequently described in opposition to one another? How can I build a career that does that too?) with technical ones (How can I measure sentiment in a corpus of news documents? How do I demonstrate that what NLP algorithms find is statistically significant?).