Reviews
12/29/2011, "A year in review: When history becomes art," by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim in Egypt Independent
"Sakr wrote, "human experience… is in a constant state of becoming. In this case, R-Shief is designed to embody this in its code and machine intelligence," describing the archive as a technological innovation that learns, experiences, and draws connections like a living brain. R-Shief reads the internet and learns from it, organizing the unfathomable information web into something slightly more fathomable."
12/12/2011, "The People's Skype' and Occupy Wall Street Hackathons", by Neal Ungerleider Fast Company
"Laila Shereen Sakr, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, has played a crucial role in the lab's efforts and has demonstrated her findings to, among others, executives at Facebook."
10/27/2011, "From the Manhattan Project to the Cloud: Arms Control in the Information Age" by Assistant Secretary Rosemary Gottemoeller at Stanford University
"Laila Shereen Sakr, a PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California, followed the Arab Spring closely, creating a massive database of Arabic-language tweets. 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."
09/30/2011, "Social Scientists Wade Into the Tweet Stream", by Greg Miller in Science
"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."
07/15/2011, "The Struggle to document Egypt's Revolution" by Jack Shenker in The Guardian
"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."
06/27/2011, "VJ Um Amel hits 'the social' in media" by Lina Attalah in Al-Masry Al-Youm
"VJ Um Amel's work thus acts as an active site of production of meaning, particularly relevant to the process of theorizing the history of what has happened. Her work also takes the conversation about new media away from the anxieties of celebrating its tools, which has become almost an aesthetic process of understanding this novel world. VJ Um Amel hits "the social" in media, travels through the mass of content and produces possible configurations through it. This is the focus of her practice."
06/25/2011, "Digital Learning and the Arab Spring" by Liz Losh in Digital Media and Literacy Blog
“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.”
06/22/2011, "Interview with VJ Um Amel" by Youmna Chlala in ArtTerritories
"I see my online visualizations as a form of extending single subjectivities - whether expert, popular, or imaginative - and activating new virtual worlds," she told Youmna Chlala of Art Territories."
05/18/2011, Twitter's Window on Middle East Uprisings" by Jon Friedman in The Wall Street Journal
"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...'My conclusion about the Middle East is that there has already been a social change and there is no turning back," Shereen Sakr said. "People have stood up against the governments. Social media activated them and turned them on."
03/01/2011, "VJ Um Amel Remixes a Revolution" by Dylan Schenker in The Creators Project
"In her application of different remix and data visualization techniques, Sakr developed a body of work that puts into perspective both the revolution and how it has been shaped by the current media environment."
02/25/2011, "Not Your Mother's VJ"" by Liz Losh in Virtualpolitik
"For this reason, I think your experimentation with non-verite renditions of revolution are really exciting (for communicating across difference, as well as to communicate more complex ideas then, say, "freedom," or "courage," or "arab" that iconic images can reduce themselves to)."