The concept of identity seems to be all the rage now in the social sciences. A critical focus of process oriented scholarship concerns why and how the social groups to which we belong whether ethnic, national, or transnational influence the knowledge, interpretations, beliefs, preferences, and strategies, that underlie both our individual and collective behavior. In addition, it appears that scholars have come to recognize that much discourse by actors is, broadly speaking, identity discourse; that is, actors use particular adjectives that describe the self and others in order to achieve goals, and these articulated self descriptions also serve as motivations for behavior. It is accurate to say, however, that there is not much consensus on how to define identity; nor is there consistency in the procedures used for determining the content and scope of identity; nor is there agreement on where to look for evidence that identity indeed affects knowledge, interpretations, beliefs, preferences, and strategies; nor is there agreement on how identity affects these components of action. At its simplest, the problem is that in social science there is no consensus on how to treat identity as a variable. Not that we should fetishize consensus but its absence reflects the dearth of work on some basic questions about how to conceptualize and study identity. We prefer to put the problem this way: If identity is a key independent variable explaining political, economic, and social behavior, how does it vary, why does it vary, and how would one know variation if one saw it? The aim of this project is to develop conceptualizations of identity and, more importantly, to develop technologies for observing identity and identity change that will have application in the social sciences. Heretofore the usual techniques for analyzing identity have consisted of hard-to-replicate discourse analysis or lengthy individual interviews, at one extreme, or the use of large-N surveys at the other. Yet, much social science research relies on historical and contemporaneous texts. We hope to develop computer-aided quantitative and qualitative methods for analyzing a large number of textual sources in order to determine the content, intensity, and contestation of individual and collective identities at any particular point in time and space. These methods will add to the portfolio of existing methods. It will allow researchers to approach identity research with a wider range of tools, including more rigorous and replicable methods of analyzing identity as an independent (and dependent) variable.