[jsprogrammer]

People have been trying to do textual analysis to divine all kinds of things about the people who wrote the text. You'll even find papers in psychology or psychiatry journals claiming to be able to distinguish mental illnesses, based purely on a textual analysis. Also, all manner of religions are essentially founded on textual analysis.

It is correct to call such analyses, tools. They cannot give you answers that you can rely on. At best, they may give you hints of other places to look. However, one problem such analysis can run into is that when the signal (the patterns and templates that the analysis was looking for) disappears, the tool becomes rather worthless (in which case, you may want to consider how useful/correct-for-the-job the tool really was).

In the case described in the article, it seemed like an appropriate use of textual analysis.