Ryan McGrady

My current research with the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst focuses uses mixed methods to study large internet platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok. It began as an effort to better understand harmful speech on these sites, but quickly turned into a large project to address major gaps in research. To start, how can we talk about how much harmful speech is on YouTube if nobody seems able to properly characterize YouTube as a whole. We devised a random sampling method which we used to publish what we think is the best characterization of YouTube to-date. We're now using our methods to study differences between language communities (how does English YouTube compare to Hindi or Russian YouTube, for example). I'm also affiliated as a researcher with Media Cloud, a news database and media analysis platform.

At NCSU, my work primarily focused on Wikipedia, its community dynamics, and the systems of rules which enable it to work. My dissertation examined what I called the "production of encyclopedic authority" throughout the history of encyclopedias and on Wikipedia in particular. While a grad student, I taught media studies and communication courses and worked for a few years running programs at a nonprofit bridging Wikipedia and higher education.