History

« Faites don de vos SMS à la science »

In 2004, with the support of three private partners and the media, the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium) launched an operation called "Faites don de vos sms à la science" (Operation's website). This first experience, restricted to the French-speaking part of Belgium, enabled them to define a methodology for message collecting and to establish protocols for the preparation of corpora before their use for research (anonymisation, transcription, annotation). The private partners (Proximus, Ogilvy and NEWAy) managed the technical aspects of the data collecting and the media spread the news, which enabled the project to reach a large part of the population. The media coverage exceeded our expectations, which proves both the media's, and more widely the population's interest in this subject.

Results of the Belgian experience SMS collecting duration :

2 months
Numbers of SMS gathered : more than 75.000 SMS
Number of participants : 3200 people
Number of participants who answered the sociolinguistic survey (optional, available on the Web) : 2775 people

Publications

The book	The corpus on CD-Rom
Fairon C., Klein J. et Paumier S. (2006), «Le Corpus SMS pour la science. Base de données de 30.000 SMS et logiciels de consultation», CD-Rom, Presses universitaires de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve. Cahiers du Cental, 3.2. © Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2006 Dépôt légal : D/2006/9964/18 ISBN : 2-87463-028-4 TO ORDER	Fairon C., Klein J. et Paumier S. (2006), «Le langage SMS. Etude d'un corpus informatisé à partir de l'enquête 'Faites don de vos SMS à la science'», Presses universitaires de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve. Cahiers du Cental, 3.1. 136p. © Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2006 Dépôt légal : D/2006/9964/38 ISBN : 2-87463-048-9 TO ORDER