About

Rhododendrites.com is the website of Ryan McGrady.

Senior Researcher with the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Researcher for Media Cloud. I tend to call my field "public interest internet research," but in practice that means trying to better understand the fundamentals of sites/services/companies that own/control/shape/enable/influence so much of our communication -- specifically, YouTube, Wikipedia, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, and online news.

Research areas

In 2021, I was trying to kick off a project studying harmful speech on YouTube when something became clear: there's an awful lot we don't know about YouTube. Just answering basic questions proved difficult or impossible: how many videos are on YouTube? How much of it is in English? How many views does the average video receive? Why was it so hard to learn about one of the biggest, most powerful websites in the world? Finding answers became the primary goal. Two years later, we had findings to share and a pipeline for studying random samples of YouTube videos (paper/writeup/website).

Random sampling, it turns out, was such a daunting task that hardly anyone had tried it. With the ability to produce large, representative samples we found ourselves with, frankly, too many research possibilities. The first follow-up project was to start looking for differences between language-specific samples. In other words, how does English YouTube look different from Hindi, Spanish, or Russian YouTube? That paper is under review, but we're already using some of its findings to take the next step: hand coding and qualitative/content analyses to better understand news, politics, popularity, and privacy in one or more language.

Other active projects: YouTube as an archive, relationship between recommendations and language, random sampling on TikTok.

With Media Cloud, I do the occasional news analysis, either for its own sake (e.g. word use during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict) or as part of a larger project (e.g. comparing media attention to Truth Social and Twitter).

From 2015 to 2020 I was a program manager with the Wiki Education Foundation, running and designing programs to bridge academia and Wikipedia, usually with a focus on improving media literacy and public knowledge. I've been interested in Wikipedia since 2006, and while I haven't had the time to make it a research focus since finishing my dissertation, it's not due to lack of interest and I'm still active as a volunteer contributor, organizer, and speaker, involved with Wikimedia New York City, English Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons.

What is this?

The name of the site goes back almost twenty years, when I tried to combine [something to do with the brain/nervous system] and [something to do with flowers]. It's also my name on Wikipedia and in a few other places. If I'd known back then that I'd have to say it out loud fairly frequently, I might've chosen something shorter.

I created this website in 2007, learning enough html, css, php, and sql to make a blog from scratch rather than depend on a blog hosting service. It worked well for a while. ...Then the comment spam and SQL injections started coming in. My web host disappeared sometime around 2012. Now, many years later, it's time to recreate something, so why not ressurect it, but make it a static site? The design is a bit dated and the code is clumsy (maybe I'll spruce it up over time), but it works. See also: New Site, Who Dis?

Copyright stuff

This site retains full copyright by default, mostly in case I forget to indicate that I'm using something I don't own, or because of restrictions on content first published elsewhere. Each post/page should have a footer with licensing information about the text/media. Nearly all of the photos and many of the individual posts/pages have Creative Commons licenses.

What's with the birds?

I've always liked birds, and in 2020, amid the COVID lockdown in NYC, the casual interest turned into a minor obsession. I started out taking photos to illustrate Wikipedia articles (they're all up on Wikimedia Commons before they appear here), but it's turned into a bigger hobby. As to their use here, while I'll use relevant images where available, it's hard to find freely licensed ones that are still relevant without resorting to something AI-generated. So why not throw some birds in?