TextThresher is a mass collaboration software allowing researchers to direct hundreds of volunteers – working through the internet – to label tens of thousands of text documents according to all the concepts vital to researchers’ theories and questions. With TextThresher, projects that would have required a decade of effort, and the close training of wave after wave of research assistants, can be completed in about a year and a half online. The project will likely begin beta-testing the software in late 2017, with plans to release it to the general public in early 2018.