• The New York Times, Monday, October 31, 2011 12:09 PM

Will marketers soon be required to have in degrees Twitterology? I probably won’t hurt, but, wait, what’s Twitterology? The burgeoning study -- most by linguists, sociologists, and psychologists -- of language and human behavior on Twitter. “Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its immediacy -- and its immensity,” writes Ben Zimmer, a former On Language columnist for The New York Times Magazine, in the newspaper. “Instead of relying on questionnaires and other laborious and time-consuming methods of data collection, social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter’s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action.”

Two sociologists at Cornell University, for example, recently published a study in the journal Science that looked at how emotions may relate to the rhythms of daily life, across many English-speaking countries. “They observed, as Zimmer notes, “a gradual falloff in positive terms from the beginning of the workday, bottoming out in the late afternoon.” Valuable information for, oh, a beer brand, we’d say.

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