Superb cloud-based software tool with powerful text analytics with social media integration.

It allowed me to conduct research that otherwise would not have been possible including both industry and academic projects.

Pros

The ability for those from the social sciences to be able to import and/or retrieve social media data, including historical data from Twitter, and analyse the data in order to answer research questions. This is because other tools may require a computer science background. Consequently, DiscoverText has been used in answering important social science questions leading to peer reviewed outputs. Over the years I have seen many tools appear and slowly wither away, however, DiscoverText has stood the test of time and has been growing in popularity. DiscoverText is not limited to academic uses and has a number of neat uses in the commercial world. A useful feature applicable to the commercial domain is the ability to retrieve and/or import data from Twitter and identify influential Twitter users, with the additional ability to use machine learning to sift influential users into different groups. For example, a football club may be interested to find out whether influential users are fans of the club or whether it is opposition fans causing a storm. To the best of my knowledge, no other tool is capable of doing this with this level of accuracy.

Cons

To be fair this is not a limitation of DiscoverText per se, as this is a restriction from Twitter, but there is a limit to how many units of tweets can be exported per day. This is not a major issue because there are enough features in DiscoverText that you may not necessarily need to export the data. This is particularly true with a recent integration with NodeXL which provides the ability to export directly to a format supported by NodeXL.

A much better way to scrape data than learning how to code an API

I'm a PhD candidate who straddles the Humanities and Social Sciences, so I use DiscoverText as a research tool.

Pros

My review of DiscoverText is a bit limited because I'm really only using it for Twitter. That said, the features are incredible. I know a bit about coding, but the prospect of learning JSON to use Twitter's API was doable but daunting. When I came across DiscoverText I was so pleased to find a way to search, use, and categorize Twitter data that made sense and would save me A LOT of time. I didn't anticipate getting access to so much useful metadata that was easy to navigate and use, so I was pleasantly surprised. The built-in bucket and dataset features are great ways to organize the massive amount of Twitter data that can be collected. The ability to code the data with peers within DiscoverText is also super useful. I really can't exaggerate how many features DiscoverText has that I didn't think I would need but have used to improve the quality of my scholarship.

Cons

The software has many features that I didn't find on my own, so the UI could be improved a bit. That said, the one-on-one tutorial that the founder provides helps mitigate this issue. The tutorial videos are helpful too! You'll just have to be prepared to set aside a few hours to really learn the program.

Great for analyzing social media data- just not offline documents.

Pros

If you need to analyze data from social media and survey monkey- it's a great tool. You can search for content by keywords and the data drops in per the chosen frequency. It breaks down keywords and phrases to a list in order of use- where you can drill into each word or phrase to see where it's used and also toggle between different ways of displaying the results.

Cons

I got the trial version to see if it would suit my purpose; I required a tool to analyze and cluster data from articles and other sources but just couldn't get it to work. If the trial period had been longer than 3 days ( I thought I signed up for 30- it's not very clear) I might have had time to figure it out. Better instructions would have helped. The instructions tell you what the features are, not why you need to use them which is not helpful for novice users.

Honestly,I can say DiscoverText makes analyzing social data not only easier, but also more enjoyable

It provides me more opportunities for working on my projects. Using it, I have access to many ways for doing research on social media data which have not before.

Pros

First, it is so easy to learn and use. Moreover, the DiscoverText founders provided some helpful tutorials and educational videos which are so handy and helpful. This software allows users to makes several datasets of one project. This enables a researcher to work on multi-dimentions of a certain project needless to create different ones. Furthermore, you can create a sample of your data very easily by making a dataset. Its buckets are very interesting also. Additionally, you can make some clouds of data by using cloud explorer feature. Finally, Clustering option is great! it makes working on big data easy and shows the main trends in them quickly.

Cons

As I can say, sometimes users may get confused by many links and pages. So, maybe finding what you want becomes difficult and you have to try some ways. Another con, in my point of view, is the obscurity of metadata meanings and algorithms. I cannot understand what some of the means and how they are calculated. Furthermore, I think some of metadata can be presented in some more useful ways. But at all, I should confess the metadata explorer is a great ability!

We have been using the software to study twitter conversations on immigration going back to 2013.

Easy data capture

Pros

It's ability to capture tweets and now the capacity to export to NodeXL gives us two tools that we use together to study the content and structure of immigration conversations onTwitter.

Cons

At times navigating the menus is counter-intuitive as is some of the terminology. Archives, buckets, datasets all kind of run into one another.