Much has been written about how social movements change organizations and society, and we’re certainly seeing it today. Normal-science theory and testing of this influence tended to focus on how movements change concrete structures, such as organizational policies and state laws. Now, with new computational text-analysis tools, we have the potential to systematically measure social movement influences on the language and culture of organizations and societies. Our first study pursuing this type of research quantifies how a major social movement changed workplace communications. In this talk I will share early findings from that study and reflect on challenges that arise in developing and testing theory for this purpose—and in bridging between the rich legacy social science literature and an emerging world of large-scale communication data and limited-transparency computational tools.