Over the last ten years, we have had the privilege of working with a wide variety of amazing researchers interested in studying social data. From the earliest days that we worked to develop the free, open source Coding Analysis Toolkit, researchers have asked us about getting blog data, RSS feeds, and other text or image data streams via APIs. 

Along the way, we have learned many important lessons and adapted our software to try and keep up with the most ambitious scholars. Researchers are always seeking more and better data along with new tools to unearth insights from, for example, the flood of multilingual social media. Dr. Patricia Riley of the USC Annenberg School of Communication is one such researcher. In this interview, “Patti” shares a number of important ideas about how to study the future with social data.