The Project

Welcome to What’s New, Switzerland?a university project financed by the SNSF in the context of the NCCR Evolving Language. The project is non-commercial and not affiliated to WhatsApp and Facebook.

As a part of the NCCR Evolving Language work package Emotion Integration, we are interested in understanding how humans use language to communicate emotion. More specifically, our team is interested in finding out how we do so via text messaging, and specifically WhatsApp.

A corpus of WhatsApp data already exists from the What’s Up, Switzerland? Project. This data is from 2010 to 2014 and already provides a great resource for investigating emotion in texting. Our goal is to create a newer corpus that can be used to compare them to see how communicating emotion has evolved over time, as text messaging has technologically evolved quite a bit in 8 years, from emojis to stickers to gifs. Our aim is also to collect enough data and metadata to be able to use machine learning methods.

For this, we are launching another WhatsApp data collection in the Summer of 2022. If you and people that you know would be willing to donate some of your whatsapp chats to us, please do so, and feel free to spread the word! Any and all data we can get will help us out.