Using an Application Programming Interface (API) call to twitter by registering a twitter application I was able to gather data from twitter. I prefer statistical software like SAS or R and both of these can make http requests built into some code and then import the JSON web data file. I would recommend learning this programming yourself as it does not take a deep knowledge of programming and gives one fairly fine grained control on data gathering and is much cheaper than using a canned application. R software is free here www.r-project.org Many publishing mathematical statisticians are using R and are publishing new R routines these days. The other approach is to teach computer scientists social science I guess. I think they would be using python computer language these days. Peter Timusk This is my own opinion and I do not speak for my employer or associations I am a member of or volunteer with including charities and political parties unless otherwise noted.