Having just presented at The Access to Knowledge for Development Center's (A2K4D) second annual workshop at AUC's Tahrir Campus in Cairo, Egypt on June 14, 2011, R-Shief Project Lead Laila Shereen Sakr (aka VJ Um Amel) and R-Shief are generating a lot of interest this last week in June....

VJ Um Amel hits ‘the social’ in media | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today's News from Egypt
Laila Shereen Sakr, digitally known as VJ Um Amel, speaks fondly about the real-time mixing between theory and practice. Her project, R-Shief, launched in early June, illustrates this new methodological approach to questioning and learning. more...

Digital Learning and the Arab Spring | DMLcentral
As revolution and revolt spreads across the Arab world, Americans often see social networking sites and online video as playing a starring role. Whether it is testimony about police brutality or jubilation in the squares, examples of so-called witness journalism captured by cell phone cameras, webcams. more...

Interview with VJ Um Amel by Youmna Chlala | ArtTerritories
VJ Um Amel’s work takes hold of the dizzying speed at which image, text and communication collide and transform it into intentional markers of identity and possibility. As we discuss the role of reproduction, distance and theft in contemporary art, we also get a little closer to understanding Donna Haraway’s assertion that “race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts.” more...

Democratizing knowledge: A24KD's second annual conference
Moving to the broad field of democratized online content through social media, Laila Shereen Sakr, founder of R-Shief, a platform for online data mining and semantic content analysis, spoke of the crucial function of analyzing this content using both human and technical factors. more...

753 views