This article studies social media and popular social movements in the early 21st century in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on Egypt. Rather than ethnography or political theory exclusively, I employ a data analytics of analyzing tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media. And then I…
The R-Shief Initiative will build a working environment among scholars, librarians, policymakers, artists, and technical experts by producing a multilingual website that integrates existing open-source applications in order to archive 21st century knowledge production on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its Diaspora. Its initial archiving effort will specifically focus on Gaza, Iraq,…
The unprecedented upheavals in the Arab countries that started in Tunisia in December 2010 spread like wildfire, igniting a wave of similar protests around the world and especially in Egypt, which erupted a month later. In an act of transnational solidarity, in February 2011, an Egyptian activist ordered pizza for labor union protesters in Wisconsin….
By juxtaposing data visualizations using social media from the summer months of the 2011 Egyptian revolution to the attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014, my goal is to understand the hermeneutics (text and context) of digital knowledge produced from social unrest and citizen action as it flows among transnational actors from the earlier…
In 2011, when the uprisings broke out, many of us became glued to the news and grew hopeful for change in the political structure and leadership of Middle Eastern states whose citizens had stood up and protested against long-standing dictators. In the midst of these tumultuous events, the opportunity for new courses emerged across disciplines…
It has been a profound few weeks in the Arab world to witness, especially as an Egyptian-American. A couple of us (namely myself and code developer Christopher Morton) have been working relentlessly to get R-Shief‘s Twitter Analysis onto a stable network environment so we can continue to data mine and aggregate all Twitter posts with…