What's New, Switzerland?

2011-2022

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"What's New, Swizerland?" is an academic research project funded by the SNF in the framework of the "Evolving Language" NCCR. The project seeks to advance knowledge on how humans communicate their emotions through digital media, in particular the WhatsApp instant messaging platform, and how this communication evolves over time in relation with technological changes and emerging practices. To that effect, we have collected (between August and October 2022) and preprocessed (de-identified) a corpus of donated WhatsApp chats between French-speaking users in Switzerland, with the perspective of making it available to the scientific community.

The main result of the project is a corpus of 72 de-identified chats between 118 users (more than 500k messages and 3.5M tokens produced between 2011 and 2022). It is available on demand for research purposes under a restricted license contract, So far, the data have been used by the research team to investigate questions related to the communicative use of paralinguistic cues, notably from the point of view of communication accommodation.