R-Shief and Scholarship on Digital Activism
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/21053/r-shief-and-scholarship-on-digital-activism-featur
Today R-Shief (the site’s name is the Arabic pronunciation of “archive”) contains 18 billion tweets in English and Arabic and years’ worth of Facebook, YouTube, and website data. Every month, it processes about 100,000 million new tweets. Shereen Sakr compares English and Arabic hashtags, as well as different hashtags referring to the same events, looking for interesting patterns. Anyone can log onto the R-Shief site and do a number of searches and comparisons, using tools developed by Shereen Sakr and several collaborators.
At the moment, Shereen Sakr doesn’t have the resources to make the full archive available to a large public. If she did, she says, she’d turn it into a tool that anyone could use to answer the many shifting questions regarding the relationship between social media and political mobilization in the Arab world.