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 AboutR-Shief Labs, LLC is a virtual lab that collects and analyzes content from the Internet using swarm computing generated analytics. We provide real-time analysis of opinion about late-breaking issues in the Arab world. By using aggregate data from Twitter and the Web, R-Shief can dissect how people in Egypt are reacting to the latest changes to the constitutional process; how Libyans perceive the presence of NATO forces; how Bahrainis perceive the presence of Saudi military; and how pro-regime supporters in Syria are using social media platforms. The organization’s goal is to provide tools and services for innovative research, publication, and cultural production for a global networked audience. Our tools have been aggregating an archive of content from the Internet in Arabic and English since 2008. As the revolutions in North Africa and Middle East occurred, R-Shief’s technology was immediately employed to capacity. Today, using swarm intelligence within cloud computing infrastructure, R-Shief Labs provides one of the most comprehensive and publicly accessible repositories on the Arab Revolutions of 2011. As of November 2011, R-Shief’s Twitter harvesting tool, Twitterminer has collected around 128 million tweets, and the Web Aggregator has of petabytes of data from Facebook, blogs, and other sites. A Los Angeles-based company, R-Shief Labs, LLC licenses its tools from its sister company, R-Shief, Inc, a non-profit entity represented by Palo Alto-based law firm Fish & Richardson, LLP for in-kind patenting services. Initially designed for Arabic and English audiences by media artist and critic, Laila Shereen Sakr, the site has grown to address multilingual audiences with petabytes of social media. R-Shief Labs is currently supported with cloud computing and hosting services by Open Source Solutions, LLC. R-Shief’s EdgeFast, Agile, and on the CloudOur approach to social media analytics involves allowing the computer program to aggregate data and identify patterns in real-time—our swarm computing system gets smarter as it works by building its own lexicon. While others are focused on trends and numbers, we are focused and telling you what it all means. Our main goal is to make some real breakthroughs in understanding—what are people saying and doing online. A digital humanities project, R-Shief explores digitally born texts, conversations, and information using both human and computer analytics. Our next steps are to develop an intuitive crowdsourcing platform so we can add semantic attribution tags to R-Shief's archive of tweets. Press and Reviews“Social media is a window that is interactive and alive,” she said. Shereen Sakr this week will also be launching the first full version of R-Shief, which means archive in Arabic. R-Shief is a digital platform that houses and processes all of the information she has compiled from the Internet.”“Instead of selecting terms herself and searching the database, Sakr let a computer program aggregate data and identify patterns. While aggregating tweets from Libya, her program identified spikes in certain hashtags or selected key words. These word spikes became a sort of pulse, an early warning identifying the fall of the town of Zawiya. A short while later, similar words spikes reappeared allowing Sakr to identify the impending fall of Tripoli. She was accurate to within a few hours.”“R-Shief is a project to watch in the coming weeks as social media increases in importance and relevancy. It may also prove to be a model for social analysis beyond the events rocking North Africa.”“Unlike a traditional research project, she encourages instructors to consider allowing students to “construct a database narrative” that might be more “exciting” because it allows people to “start out with questions, not a story that has to be linear."“One of the largest repositories of Arabic-language tweets is a database started by Laila Shereen Sakr, an Egyptian-born graduate student in cinematic arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Shereen Sakr says the project originally sprang from an activist impulse to make sure the voices of Arabic speakers were heard. But she’s grown increasingly interested in the research potential. She’s found intriguing spikes in certain hashtags, the terms used to flag a topic on Twitter, preceding the fall of Zawiya and Tripoli in Libya, for example. Shereen Sakr hopes the project’s Web site (www.r-shief.org) will become a hub for researchers. “I would love for people in other disciplines to take this data and make something of it,” she says.” |