I come from a text analysis background - there are a lot of nice packages in python which make it easy to do data analysis of any kind. Have a look at Numpy + S

I come from a text analysis background - there are a lot of nice packages in python which make it easy to do data analysis of any kind. Have a look at Numpy + Scipy, nltk. You can easily find insights without a strong statistics background, but that would certainly help. Even just the basic median, mode, mean gives you a level of insight that you can extrapolate and give extra meaning to your data.