A number of important results in quantum information theory can be connected quite elegantly to the representation theory of the symmetric group through a quantum analogue of the classical information-theoretic "method of types" that arises naturally from the Schur-Weyl duality. We will give a brief introduction to this connection and brie y discuss some of the results that follow from it, such as quantum source compression rates, entanglement concentration rates, quantum entropy inequalities, and the admissisble spectra of partial density matrices from pure, multipartite entangled states.