The Needle-in-a-Haystack Method (NHM) refers to a collaborative project between Masako Fidler from the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown University and Václav Cvrček from the Institute of the Czech National Corpus at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Its aim is to organically blend quantitative and qualitative methods for text analysis.  The project uses large data from the Czech National Corpus (not only in Czech but in other languages). NHM was launched during 2011-12. It links several disciplines: corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, Slavic linguistics, social sciences, and digital humanities.

The initial inspiration for this project came from the corpus linguistic method of Keyword Analysis, which has been widely used to explore discourse topics. The authors then extended the notion of keyness, which resulted in Multi-level Discourse Prominence Analysis (2018, 2019), including keymorph analysis. Since then, several new attempts have been made: application of Market Basket Analysis to discourse analysis (2022) and Companions (forthcoming). The most recent projects concern Czech antisystem (extremist disinformation) web portals.

Since 2020 both authors are simultaneously participants in  the Threat-Defuser Project, a six-year 1.2-million-Norwegian crown research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR) (P. I. Prof. Laura Janda, Universiry of Tromsø/Arctic University of Norway).