Terms and Conditions

General Conditions of Participation

Thumbs4Science is an international research project coordinated by the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and financed by the Belgian National Research Foundation (FRS - FNRS).

Aim of the Project

  • This project aims to gather a large amount of data related to the use of new communication media in order to create both a vast ‘corpus’ of messages, which can be used as a basis for research and development activities (chiefly in linguistics and linguistic engineering), and a database of the behaviour and impressions of the authors of these messages. The compiled corpus and database will be diffused, as this type of data is of great interest to a large scientific community.
  • In order to achieve this aim, the sponsors of the project are calling for participation and are looking for volunteers to ‘donate’ their messages by sending them to the email address provided (for Facebook, What’s App and Viber). Volunteers are also encouraged to complete two questionnaires (sociolinguistic and psychological).

Copyrights

1. The participant confirms that he/she is the author of the messages that he/she sends in.
2. The participant allows UCL to include his/her messages in the corpus intended for scientific research.
3. The participant freely yields to UCL the rights of reproduction, modification, adaptation and communication of his/her messages. This is applicable for the entire duration of the literary and artistic ownership and applies internationally.
4. The participant allows UCL to diffuse, along with the corpus, the anonymised information collected in the sociolinguistic and psychological questionnaires that he/she has completed (see below, "Protection of Privacy").
5. The participant donates his/her messages and answers to the questionnaires without any financial compensation.
6. We urge participants themselves to obtain the consent of their interlocutors so that their written production in the form of messages is able to be sent to us.

Protection of Privacy

TECHNICAL INTERMEDIARY

  • The collection of emotional competence data requires the intervention of a technical partner (Mood Walk), who is in responsible for reception, consultation and transfer of data to UCL.
  • Mood Walk equally manages the interactions with participants who have provided their email address. In order to effectively manage this task, Mood Walk retains your email address on record, in compliance with privacy legislation. Should you wish to delete your email address, simply send an email explicitly stating so to: vospouces@uclouvain.be.

UCL’S COMMITMENT

  • UCL agrees not to diffuse and to protect by all appropriate technical means the participants’ personal information (telephone numbers, names, email addresses) in its possession.
  • Information from the questionnaires (nationality, age, mother tongue, new media usage habits, etc.) is set to be diffused in a strictly anonymous manner.
  • Before being integrated into the corpus, What’s App/Viber and Facebook messages will be anonymised (replacing of people’s names with generic names, deletion of addresses, numbers, etc.).
  • Personal data collected as part of this project will be managed by UCL’s Centre for Automatic Language Processing (CENTAL - Place Blaise Pascal 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), with the sole purpose of good management of the Thumbs4Science project, and in strict compliance with legislation on privacy and protection of personal data. In accordance with the law on the respect of privacy, dated 8th December 1992, all participants may exercise their right of control over data concerning them, and, if necessary, may have this data amended or deleted by sending a written request to: vospouces@uclouvain.be. After verification of the participant’s identity, his/her request will be dealt with as quickly as possible.
  • This project is subject to a declaration of further processing of non-coded data for historical, statistical or scientific purposes at the Commission of the Protection of Privacy.

Duration of the Project

The first phase of the study will start on 7th November 2016 and will continue until 7th January 2017. UCL reserves the right to interrupt this project at any time.

Rules of the Prize Draw

  • A prize draw will be carried out by UCL every two weeks. The selected winners will receive a prize (iPad, cinema tickets, vouchers for online shopping, etc.) as thanks for their participation.
  • The prize draw will take place every other Monday (except for the first week) under the supervision of Ms Deniz Uygur (UCL, Girsef).
  • Only participants who have completed the 4 activities proposed on the home page are able to participate in the prize draw. These activities are:
    • Complete the questionnaire on emotional competence
    • Send the Facebook messages
    • Complete the sociolinguistic questionnaire
    • Send the What's App or Viber messages
  • The prize draw is carried out by a computer programme in the database of received messages.
  • The name of the winners will be announced on the Facebook page of the project: https://www.facebook.com/groups/langagereseauxsociaux/. The winners will be asked by email to contact CENTAL in order to claim their prize. Any unclaimed prizes at the time of the following prize draw will be put back into the prize draw. The winners therefore have two weeks to come forward.