This talk will provide a basic introduction to FireAnt, a freeware tool that I have co-developed with Laurence Anthony (Waseda University). FireAnt offers three main utilities: the live collection of real-time tweets; the ability to filter that (and many other kinds of) data based on user-defined parameters; and the ability to export the data in formats suitable for corpus tools, network graphing, timeseries analysis, and so forth. I'll demonstrate each of these steps in turn, and provide suggestions along the way for possible types of investigation that FireAnt has been and can be used for. There will be time at the end for questions.