One of the important features of contemporary society is that it produces a large amount of self-descriptions; by the words of Niklas Luhmann, the modern society is an intensively self-observing and self-reporting system. The aim of this course is to provide students with knowledge of relatively broad issues of methods of analysis of these self-descriptions, which are mainly texts in their nature (media texts, biographic narratives, conversations, open-ended questions in questionnaires, expert discourse texts etc.). The successful student will become fluent in the vocabulary of narrative, discursive, content, and computer-assisted text analyses and bring those tools to bear on various kinds of texts.