Challenges and experiences in collecting a chat corpus

Present day access to a wealth of electronically available linguistic data creates enormous opportunities for cutting edge research questions and analyses. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) data are specifically interesting, for example because the multimodal character of new media puts our ideas about discourse issues like coherence to the test. At the same time CMC data are ephemeral, because of rapid changing technology. That is why we urgently need to collect CMC discourse data before the technology becomes obsolete. This paper describes a number of challenges we encountered when collecting a chat corpus with data from secondary school children in Amsterdam. These challenges are various in nature: logistic, ethical and technological.