In 2008, the digital archive R-Shief was created to collect, analyze, and visualize social media content. R-Shief would become a repository of multiple social movements from Occupy Wall Street to the 2011 Arab Uprisings. In its first years, R-Shief rapidly grew into a complex media system for collecting and analyzing data from social networking sites and innovating machine learning software.

Using its immense data repository, the project developed one of the earliest detection algorithms that recognized language based on the series of characters in a tweet. R-Shief is a rich resource for social media analytics, digital activism, publications, art exhibitions, performances, visual art, and film production. According to Google Scholar, R-Shief has been cited in over 150 publications.
 

Today, R-Shief is a media research system that archives, analyzes, and visualizes social media and Internet data on digital campaigns for social justice movements globally.

For more R-Shief history, check out the interactive timeline below.
 

R-Shief is now an archive. It documents the platform, the data, and the decade of work that built it — 2008 to 2017. For the work that continues from it, see Contrapuntal.