An Archive of Social Media Collections for
Researchers, Activists, and Artists
with a focus on the Middle East
Explore a dashboard of visualization and analysis tools for an archive of millions of multilingual tweets from the 2009-2014 Arab uprisings and Occupy movements.
Explore the older versions of the
R-Shief platform. The legacy sites include the beta version of 2008, the first launch in 2011, then 2012, 2014, and then 2016.
In 2008, Laila Shereen Sakr created the digital archive, R-Shief, 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 enabling me to collect and analyze data from social networking sites and to innovate machine learning software. Using its immense data repository, Sakr 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 one hundred and fifty 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.