From Slashdot a story about the text Analysis of 250,000 hacker conversations. A security company Imperva has been analyzing hacker forums to understand trends, how people learn about hacking, and what are popular strategies.
In the Imperva report, Hacker Intelligence Initiative, Monthly Trends Report #5 (PDF) they describe their methodology as “content analysis” (their quotations) but it mostly involves searching for threads and reading. The report has great examples of the types of discussions.
A good example of how simple text analysis can help industry understanding.