How can I get the followers of a user on twitter, then get posts from those followers over a period of time so i can create a database?

I've been assigned a research project to enhance social networ开发者_如何学Pythonking based adaptive e-learning and to do so I need to be able to extract several (hundreds, maybe thousands) of status updates or tweets in order to perform factor analysis on key words. Apparently this can be done with javascript but I have never used javascript before so I'm a bit lost. I know I need a Twitter API but not sure even how to use one. Anybody have any idea how I can do this?

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use statuses/followers for getting all followers of a user and statuses/friends_timeline to get tweets by your friend. Response will be in JSON or XML format which can be parsed and used very easily.

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses%C2%A0followers

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses-friends_timeline