Academic Poker Research and DataMining

[LacquDown]

I am a sociologist at Cornell University interested in doing my Ph.D. dissertation on stratification and strategy in online poker games and careers. To do this, I need to amass a fairly large dataset of players at various limits over a reasonable time period, and I'm wondering what the best way to do this is.

1. Is there a way to purchase or acquire anonymized hand-histories to load into PokerTracker?

2. Which mining software is best to collect data on as many tables as possible at once? Further, by logging into various Windows accounts, can one run the poker sites and mining programs numerous times on the same computer?

Thanks for any and all help, advice and/or referrals anybody is inclined to offer!

[BlueBear]

Yes, search the archives here regarding the purchase/acquisition of hand-histories. Discussion on mining software has been discussed ad nauseam here too.