Moods: Building Massive Open Online Diaries for Researchers, Teachers and Contributors Conference Item Moods: Building Massive Open Online Diaries for Researchers, Teachers and Contributors

Internet-based research conducted in partnership with paid crowdworkers and volunteer citizen scientists is an increasingly common method for collecting data from large, diverse populations. We wanted to leverage webbased citizen science to gain insights into phenomena that are part of people’s everyday lives. To do this, we developed the concept of a Massive Open Online Diary (MOOD). A MOOD is a tool for capturing, storing and presenting short updates from multiple contributors on a particular topic. These updates are aggregated into public corpora that can be viewed, analysed and shared. MOODs offer a novel method for crowdsourcing diary-like data in a way that provides value for researchers, teachers and contributors. MOODs also come with unique community-building and ethical challenges. We describe the benefits and challenges of MOODs in relation to Errordiary.org, a MOOD we created to aid our exploration of human error.