(Sorry if this is the wrong section, I thought about putting it in the Tech Talk forum but wanted it to be public)

This isn't really affiliate related, but figured one of you chaps might be able to help my wife out. She's doing an MRes in Applied Linguistics and for her thesis she is planning on looking at language use on twitter.

To get the data to analyse, she needs to generate random twitter users that meet set criteria, including:

  • First Name (eg: John)
  • Country/Location (Ideally UK)
  • Less than X number of followers


This should all be possible somehow because she's expanding on research done by a PhD student in the US who looked at something similar for US twitter users (ie: she wants to look at the same thing, but in the UK). Unless of course they just took a massive data dump and filtered it afterwards, but I'm hoping that's not the case.

So far I've helped her pull some data using cURL with a basic search (eg: searching for 'john') but that's about as far as I could go.

We're mainly stuck on the syntax - what we can search for and what the correct inputs would be. I also haven't been able to figure out how you search for multiple things at once - I took a guess at the syntax being "q=john&something_else=whatever" but that didn't work.

If anyone has experience with this kind of thing and can point us in the right direction, my wife will be incredibly grateful!