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From archive to analytics: the R-Shief media system and the stories it tells
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From archive to analytics: the R-Shief media system and the stories it tells
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
From Archive to Analytics:
The R-Shief Media System and the Stories It Tells
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Media Arts and Practice
By
Laila Shereen Sakr
M.F.A. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2009
M.A. Georgetown University, 1998
B.A. University of Cincinnati, 1993
Dissertation committee:
Dean Anne Balsamo, Chair
Professor Steve Anderson, Co-chair
Professor Mike Patterson
Professor Laurie Brand
Professor Sherene Seikaly
i
ABSTRACT
In 2008, I began to engineer an ambitious multi-function media system, R-Shief, with the
aim to attend to critical gaps in computational and textual analysis on social media. This real-
time analysis, creative representation, and innovative technology became an engine. Its data,
tools, and logics evolved to archive and reflect digital uprising, as well enabling it in specific
ways. R-Shief became a source to produce 3D interactive media, generative art, remix video,
data visualizations, and live cinema.
Over the following several years, this research transformed into a real-time analytics
media system that revealed how material bodies shaped a virtual body politic in the context of
global uprising—specifically, the Arab uprisings. It also served as a data house for eighteen
billion social media posts collected over more than five years and across several media
platforms.
The production and consumption of this digital archive reveal and challenge the
boundaries and frictions between art, technology, and scholarship. Addressing both the potential
and the limitations of these archival and media practices provides a unique opportunity to reflect
on the politics of knowledge production on the Middle East and new media.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No substantial research project can be completed without the support of many
individuals. The debts of this dissertation are many and my gratitude to all who have given their
time and support is deep. To the activists, revolutionaries, and all those who have mobilized their
communities on the ground and online towards a world with human rights, justice, and dignity,
this dissertation is affectionately dedicated.
I am abundantly grateful to my dissertation committee for the many stimulating
conversations I have had with each of them about media, politics, and art and for a long-lasting
intellectual dialogue and friendship. I wish to thank Laurie Brand for her genuine open-
mindedness, collegiality, and valuable advice; Mike Patterson for his creative brilliance and
ability to go straight to the heart of the matter; and Sherene Seikaly for her provocative
challenges, tough criticism laden with caring, and belief in this project from its inception—a
mention of gratitude to her seems too small. To Steve Anderson, whose genius and determination
founded one of the first hybrid theory and practice PhD programs in the country, I am utterly
grateful for his constant encouragement to explore deeper into creative and untraditional doctoral
scholarship. To Anne Balsamo, who taught, stimulated, guided, and encouraged me over the
years, I am humbled by the good fortune it was to come under her tutelage. Her faith in me and
in my project proved unwavering, as she continued to serve as my advisor even as she changed
institutions halfway through my studies and performed the new and demanding role of dean at
The New School in New York City.
To the team of developers at R-Shief, with whom it has been a great learning adventure
and honor to work, I bow in respect. These individuals have worked tirelessly and volunteered
months and years of their time towards this open source project. To Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan,
iii
who has dedicated her and her family’s lives to the Arabic software localization and open source
movements, words are not enough. Inspired by her software development and dedication to
training others, I sought her out as the first developer I worked with on this project while she and
her husband, Alaa Abd al-Fattah, were living in South Africa. Today, her husband remains in
Egypt’s prison sentenced to five years for inciting protests in November 2013, as Egypt’s courts
continues to enforce a No Protest Law. To Manal and her family, I remain in solidarity. I also
want to thank Ranwa Yehia and the late Ali Shaath—friends, comrades, and co-founders of
R-Shief’s partner, the Arab Digital Expression Foundation. I miss you, Ali. To Ali’s partner,
Ranwa, I offer my awe and appreciation for her strength to continue to build what they started
together, in solidarity with the larger community of Arab technologists and activists.
To Benjamin Doherty, an activist and programmer, I thank deeply for his friendship and
constant diligence and accountability to the work we provided. His keen ability to communicate
sophisticated computation taught me more than I could have learned from any book. To
Mahmoud Said, who worked remotely from Alexandria, Egypt, while also working full-time and
raising three beautiful boys, I thank for always being an inspiration. I am grateful to Mahmoud
for having helped me manage R-Shief, Inc. To Dan Selden, I thank for having taken over the
burden of interface design of the R-Shief media system 3.0. His talented design skills and
commitment to his work, as he also juggled many projects, helped motivate me to work even
more diligently for the sake of the R-Shief team.
I also wish to thank the many people who served on R-Shief’s board of advisors—Osama
Abi Mershed, Miriyam Aouragh, Lina Attalah, Brenda Bickett, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Robin
Dougherty, Laurie King, Liz Losh, Lynn Maalouf, Marcy Newman, Sherene Seikaly, and Helga
Tawil-Souri, and Jillian York. I am particularly indebted to Steven Keller and Bassam Haddad,
iv
who not only served on R-Shief’s advisory board from the very beginning, but whose decades of
friendship and years of support for this project have kept it alive through the difficult times.
Thank you all for inspiring and motivating me to keep raising the bar.
There are too many colleagues and friends to mention. In particular, I want to thank Adel
Iskander for his editorial ear and his unabated humor during revolutionary times; and another
editor, Mark LeVine, for whose comradery, solidarity, and passion I extend my warmest
gratitude. One’s friends serve as stars and guides along our paths. Rosie Bsheer is one of those
stars providing me with an anchor at times of need. Another star in my universe, Liz Kepferle,
who has come to my rescue in the final hours of this dissertation with editorial diligence in the
midst of too much, I thank from the deepest places within my heart.
To my family, I owe everything. Offering thanks to my mother and father is the least I
can do to the most beautiful people continue to nurture me well into my adulthood. To my sisters
and brothers—Ahmed, Yasmine, Peri, and Rafik—thank you for teaching me about sharing and
community and a life with love and lots and lots of people. I am proud to be a part of this clan.
To my beautiful three daughters—Amel, my hope; Aya, my poetry; and Dahlia, my
flower—you are my life. You girls have taught me about the beauty of being vulnerably human.
Thank you for bringing the daily discipline and infinite joy I needed to complete this dissertation.
Finally, to my best friend, my life partner, my husband through thick and thin, this is for us.
Thank you, Fadi, for your endless patience with me as I disappeared before daybreak without
word until nightfall day after day. Thank you for doing whatever it takes to support us as I
traveled and studied hard. Thank you for raising our children with me and providing a home for
all of us. You are my home. To you, I offer this humble dissertation as a beginning.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction ................................................................................................... 1
Addressing Challenges ................................................................................................................ 3
Background to the Study of Digital Media on the Middle East .................................................. 7
I Vote #Tahrir ............................................................................................................................ 11
The Open Source Movement in Egypt (2004-2007) ................................................................. 14
Building an Arabic Media System ............................................................................................ 18
Media Praxis .............................................................................................................................. 21
CHAPTER TWO: Emergence of R-Shief as a Multilingual Digital Archive ........................ 24
Arabic Localization/Language .................................................................................................. 26
The January 25
th
Revolution in Egypt ....................................................................................... 28
Sentiment Analysis .................................................................................................................... 30
R-Shief 2.0 ................................................................................................................................ 32
Double-edged Technology: The Fall of Qaddafi in Libya ........................................................ 34
Media System Design ................................................................................................................ 36
The Archival Intervention ......................................................................................................... 41
CHAPTER THREE: The Animations, 3-D Interactive Storytelling, Creative Coding, Live
Cinema, and Visualization of R-Shief’s Megadata .................................................................. 47
Short Genealogy of Cultural Analytics ..................................................................................... 48
Visualizing the “Now” .............................................................................................................. 51
(Live Cinema) Video Remix ..................................................................................................... 53
(Visualization) Computational Drawings .................................................................................. 58
Image Mosaics ........................................................................................................................... 60
(Creative Coding) What the World Tweeted on #Egypt ........................................................... 63
(3D Cinema) Tweetworld .......................................................................................................... 64
CHAPTER FOUR: A Virtual Body Politic: Mobilizing Information Patterns .................... 66
Cultural Research in the Petabyte Age ...................................................................................... 69
The Bare #Egypt Tweets in 2011 .............................................................................................. 71
#GazaUnderAttack .................................................................................................................... 75
The Hashtags ............................................................................................................................. 78
CHAPTER FIVE: The Politics of Knowledge Production and New Media .......................... 83
ENDNOTES ................................................................................................................................ 86
LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................... 90
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………94
1
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
From 2010 through 2015, many people have struggled to make sense of the role of
technology (especially social media) in the fomentation of revolutionary and counter-
revolutionary praxis in Egypt. For example, controversial media pundit Malcolm Gladwell
blatantly dismissed the impact of social media in an article he published in February 2011:
Acts of communication, by themselves, are not especially interesting. We have
always had protests, riots, and revolutions, and the people who carried them out
have always found ways to spread the word. If the medium for those
communications shifts from word of mouth, to printed flier, to telephone, then to texts
and Twitter, what does it really matter? Technology becomes an important part of the
story only if it’s changing the nature of the events—and the nature of the social groups
that are carrying them out.
1
However, this was not the only position observers put forth. The online search engine, Google
Scholar, returns more than 97,000 results when searching for articles on the subject of “social
media” and “Arab uprisings.”
2
No doubt the cyber-utopianism has grown strong, especially in
the West, and among English speakers.
An example of the kind of cyber-utopian writing that is problematic at best is a 2012
report by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED). The report, titled Digital Media in the Arab World One Year After the
Revolutions, is based on a series of “35 interviews in person, by telephone, e-mail, and Skype:
primary and secondary documents; commentaries; websites; blogs, and other sources.”
3
This
research provided an overly optimistic conclusion:
Social media’s potential represents the brightest hope for the greater freedom of
expression in the Arab region, enabling tens of millions of people, and ultimately many
more, to actively pursue civic engagement, free and fair elections, political
2
accountability, the eradication of corruption, as well as free, independent, and pluralistic
media in a rapidly changing media environment.
4
What is most striking in this investigation into ‘digital’ media is the absence of any
analysis of primary digital information. However, publishing on digital humanities without
speaking digital languages or engaging primary digital media is akin to publishing on France
without knowing French or engaging any French primary material. Furthermore, the choice of
interviewing thirty-five key individuals does not speak to the scale of the research question the
report poses. It also negatively reinforces the top-down authority structures that these very
upheavals resisted.
The lack of critical scholarship on digital information and social media in the Middle East
is largely due to technical, training, and institutional limitations. Studying digital content and
producing, peer-reviewing, and publishing digital scholarship on the Middle East is necessary for
the scholarship on contemporary events and spheres. R-Shief, Inc. fills this gap by collecting and
analyzing from social networking sites using innovative techniques in machine learning. Thus R-
Shief, Inc. functions as a media lab harvesting “one of the largest repositories of Arabic-language
tweets.”
5
Leveraging its massive database, R-Shief has developed language, sentiment, and
semantic analytic tools and applied them in real-time analyses on political mobilization occurring
throughout the Middle East. This methodology entails large-scale analysis, in particular of the
R-Shief living data repository (http://r-shief.org), a unique and rich archive of multilingual social
media content from the 2011 uprisings. It also includes qualitative research based on
ethnographic, social, and historical inquiry. R-Shief is an enormous data repository in terms of
volume, velocity, and variety of data.
This dissertation works to fill the gap of visual and textual analysis on social media on
the Middle East. These existing analyses are innovative, particularly within the areas of
3
technology, media studies, and policy-making where quantifying behavior and frequencies in
real-time is useful. However, analysis of the here and now alone is insufficient in studying
cultural phenomena such as protest movements, uprisings, and other social, political, and
linguistic practices. Through a multimodal dissertation composed of written text, data
visualization, installation, and performances informed by the archive and its analytics, this
project proposes to situate social media within historical and theoretical contexts of Middle East
studies. The outcomes include a critical art practice of live video performance, visual art, digital
art, and network analysis.
This dissertation presents an extended analysis of the relationship between technology
and revolutionary practices. It uses a number of tools (statistical aggregation and visualization,
network analysis, text mining, information extraction) in order to integrate qualitative
understanding of the social and historical context of media production. This qualitative and
quantitative approach sheds light onto and addresses the space between technology and political
change. In doing so, the dissertation presents a model for future research.
Addressing Challenges
The approach in this dissertation is to examine large-scale multilingual data and
contextual knowledge that contemporary social movements produce. Computer scientists,
linguists, social scientists, humanities scholars, and interaction designers have produced this
knowledge to understand how both micro-level qualitative analysis and ‘big data’ computational
analytics offer varying and complementary perspectives on complex sociocultural research
questions. How can we gain critical insights into how transformational ideas and information on
a large-scale move differently among various actors within and across movements? To approach
4
these questions, this dissertation combines network analysis and language analytics/text-mining
with cultural and historical analysis.
This methodology uses a range of mixed methods for understanding the nature of digital
knowledge production across media and social networks. It simultaneously engages historical
and cultural analyses. This dissertation draws on scholarly and scientific materials as well as
social media, blogs, and other online publications. A socio-digital convergence of technology,
cultural transformations, and national narratives enabled the mobilization of the Arab uprisings.
The political upheaval mediated on the Internet over the past few years has raised crucial
questions about the influence of technology (particularly social media) on mobilizing and
enabling popular uprisings.
6
These events, therefore, also raise questions about the role of communication technology
in relation to the development of social movements: Do recent political uprisings in Egypt,
Spain, and on Wall Street confirm the “horizontal networks” paradigm proposed by Barry
Wellman
7
and Manuel Castells
8
and echoed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Joss Hands,
and Paul Mason?
9
Do the streams of emerging social media patterns undermine certain kinds of
hierarchical systems, or do they confirm them? The ongoing Egyptian uprising offers a unique
opportunity to research streams of emerging social media patterns and how voices are connected,
creating—thanks to the characteristics of digital media—more transnational political identities
and political subjectivities. An important shift is that contemporary mediation can no longer
divide the online–offline from the digital–paper. Merged as they are today, they may represent a
‘convergence culture,’
10
produsage
11
or media synchronization.
12
The political changes and
outcomes in turn raise new questions about the efficacy of prior empirical methods and tools.
5
The differences between the distinct theoretical and methodological foci among separate
academic disciplines further obscure the difficulty of analyzing complex developments.
13
Recent studies about the influences of technology on social movements like the Arab
uprisings rarely have incorporated rigorous Arabic language analyses on large-scale social media
(such as billions of tweets and millions of website articles over several years). This is partly due
to the lack of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to conduct computational linguistic
research in languages other than English. It is also due to lack of access to appropriate large-
scale data collections. The growth of big data, particularly collections of social media patterns,
has enabled more in-depth examination of the role of digital networks. It has allowed scientific
and policy communities to direct their attention toward aggregated imprints of online and social
media activity, without engaging in critical methodological analyses that take into account the
historical and cultural basis to inform meaningful critique. This fetishization of technology over
content has produced much research that examines the scale, speed, and directional influences in
digital networks and social media (such as those presented at the International AAAI Conference
on Weblogs and Social Media
14
conferences in recent years). However, complementary
approaches engaging in historical, cultural, and textual analysis can reveal richer insights to
explain the wider context of such phenomena.
For example, in 2009, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
conducted one of the first research initiatives on political dissent and digital content. The
resulting publication by Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey, “Mapping the
Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent,” focused on node-to-node interaction and
general demographics of bloggers.
15
While the article marked a new direction in this field of
research, it lacked explanation about the data modeling and sampling methods that were used.
6
Moreover, the model focused on defining groups of people, rather than combining the resulting
empirical data with historical and cultural understandings of the region or the transmission of
ideas across multilingual discussions in the blogosphere.
In the case of the Egyptian uprising, the challenge facing scholars when examining
contemporary digital media and political change is how to analyze information quantitatively
about groups of people in the Middle East where, historically, data science has been used to
support a form of colonialism.
16
As Timothy Mitchell explains in Colonising Egypt,
17
the
practice of science and systems of ordering national standards are modern projects that enable
governments to maintain discipline and surveillance. A cog in the colonial project, the science of
documenting every political act reflected a “tendency of disciplinary mechanisms, as Michel
Foucault has called these modern strategies of control…not to expect and dissipate as before, but
to infiltrate, and colonise.”
18
At a time when unprecedented Islamophobia and anti-Arab
sentiment exist throughout the West, critical readings of race and cultural meaning across media
are necessary. Thus, another challenge to studying technology is distinguishing the tools from
the political designs embedded in them.
A review of scholarship on media and the Middle East reveals a lack of engagement with
digital media content, whether as primary sources or in critically questioning the tools and
analytics provided. While many humanities scholars bring rich insights in history and culture,
limited tools for understanding the ontology and syntax of digital production and social media
networks constrain their analyses. Only through a combination of ethnographic research and
social network analysis on large-scale datasets can arguments by writers such as Malcolm
Gladwell, who asserts that “high risk social activism requires deep roots and strong ties,”
19
be
verified or challenged.
7
Knowledge production in the digital realm tests the boundaries between the cultural, the
archival, and the technical. It can embody all of these dimensions at once, and thus reconfigure
our understanding of each. To this extent, the digital humanities and sciences require new
methodological and conceptual tools to attend to computation and empirical knowledge.
20
This
language provides the conceptual framework for the research presented here.
Background to the Study of Digital Media on the Middle East
Many of the books published before 2010 on “new media” in the Middle East deal with
Al Jazeera or television: Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and
Redefining Modern Journalism (2003), The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are
Reshaping World Politics (2008), Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life
(2010) or Arab Television Industries (2010).
21
Other books on Middle East media scholarship
use ethnographic approaches to investigate how ‘new media’ has shaped belief, authority, social
structures, and the Arab Public: New Media and the Muslim World: The Emergent Public Sphere
(2003); and New Media and the Middle East (2009).
22
Indeed, before and even after the uprisings
of 2011, there was a clear divide between the qualitative, humanistic research Middle East media
scholars produced and the more quantitative approach of traditional communications scholars.
For example, in the articles of volume 5, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication
(2012),
23
the authors do not employ methods needed to examine large datasets of digital media
content, specifically; yet they address important sociopolitical concerns about Middle East
media.
In his book, The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East, Marc
Lynch works towards defining a political history of the Arab public sphere. Although engaged in
8
the subject of ‘the Arab public sphere’ like Anderson and Eickelman, Lynch writes post-2011
and, early on in his book, he specifically takes a stance on the role of social media in the
uprisings. The role of social media and the Internet in the Arab uprisings has often been
exaggerated, with too much focus on Facebook or Twitter and not enough on the underlying
political struggles. But this generational, structural change in the nature of political
communication represents the most fundamental and significant effect of these new media.
24
In
chapter five, Lynch devotes a section to “Hashtag Protests,” providing historical context to a
series of Twitter hashtag feeds without any empirical or textual analysis of the primary sources—
tweets themselves.
25
Since 2010, more nuanced contributions, based on empirical data about the Internet in the
region, have come out, as well as several balanced studies that explore how the revolutions were
embedded in material conditions.
26
However, these authors admit to limitations such as the
inability to “discriminate the actual mechanism underlying those chain reactions (or
unmistakably pin down social influence).”
27
Overcoming these limitations is crucial for
understanding the full complexity of contemporary events. It is in this light that we seek to
contextualize the social media data with ethnographic and historical data.
Two years after the Bruce Etling et al. article, “Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics
and Dissent Online,”
28
and following the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the same core group of
scholars organized a roundtable conference entitled ‘Blogs and Bullets II.’
Following the
conference, the Journal of Communication published a special edition focused on ‘Social Media
and Political Change: Capacity, Constraint, and Consequence.’
29
A year later, Rob Lever
interviewed the same group of scholars who participated in the Blogs and Bullets II conference
for his article “Debate Flares on ‘Twitter Revolutions’ Arab Spring.”
30
The common thread in all
9
these discussions has been the focus on debating the role of social media in the revolutionary
praxis of the region. However, each additional scholarly production does not seem to bring new
knowledge, but rather continues the debate on the causational role of social media on social
movements.
One comprehensive research effort to study the impact of social media on the Arab world
is a three-part series co-authored by Racha Mourtada and Fadi Salem.
31
Their intention was to
make sense of Twitter by recoding it into geo-locate/geo-coordinates, which is a way of
estimating, not actual statistics.
32
It is important to note the effort in translation to find a
numerical estimate that could represent the data in terms of nation-states and populations, rather
than simply exploring what is in the data imprints. Geo-location is not a common data imprint,
and is therefore often an interpretation. This top-down approach to data mining allowed the
researchers to find answers about Facebook usage based on gender, age, and national origin.
However, the categories chosen left no space for including hybrid or shifting identities. In the
second report in the series, the authors built upon their previous research on Facebook and
introduced Twitter analytics. By the time Mourtada and Salem authored the third part of the
series, “The Role of Social Media in Arab Women’s Empowerment,” they had started discussing
“netizens” (online communities) in more detail. Each of their charts provided a demographic
breakdown by country. But their approach remained unable to account for transnational netizens,
or any individuals for that matter who did not fit neatly into predetermined categories.
While technology enthusiasts are heard, so are more conservative voices. In an article that
appeared in the February 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Megan Garber warned, “A Year After the
Egyptian Revolution, 10% of Its Social Media is Already Gone.”
33
Earlier Bassem Youssef
argued that “one of the difficulties with efforts to understand the role of social media in the
10
successful North Africa uprising (Tunisia and Egypt) is a paucity of theory.”
34
He builds his
argument by critically highlighting three problems with Internet studies. First, the field theorizes
new media using ideas that have been shown to be unsophisticated even when applied to old
media, for example, seeing media primarily as a vehicle for the more or less passive receipt of
information. Secondly, they fail to theorize the specific elements that make new media ‘new.’
And finally, they ignore the active ingenuity, creativity, and agency of users, who not only
receive but also write new narratives, and generate such innovations as the Bassem Youssef
Show and Pigipedia. Furthermore, only about twenty percent of people in Egypt are online, and
they fall into specific age groupings, income divides, and education demographics, yet the
resistance movement itself clearly extends into many other walks of society.
35
Outside of the Arab world, now-casting or measurements in a variety of domains, such as
stock markets, politics, and social movements have used Twitter data. In 2011, M. Choy’s
Twitter sentiment failed to predict Singapore’s 2011 presidential election.
36
Several research
projects on Twitter sentiment analysis in particular have emerged during the last few years,
including one eighty-page report by the RAND Corporation that uses tweets by Iranians to
measure public opinion in the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election.
37
This research was
one of the first projects to use natural language processing and text analysis to determine
sentiment in tweets. Without much of a review of the historical scholarship on public opinion in
Iran, this research focuses on a linguistic approach to understanding how people communicate
and the functions of the words they use. “In practical terms, this approach suggests that it is
possible to gain insights into emotional states and social disposition, regardless of the content of
the writing.”
38
It is important to note that all of this analysis to measure a Persian/Farsi-speaking
public used only English language tweets, blinded to tweets in any other language. Despite
11
RAND’s efforts, their computer-driven analytics recently transitioned from ‘manual analysis’ to
applied simple computing techniques using a free Twitter archive service:
TwapperKeeper.com.
39
Like the others mentioned, RAND relies on other sources to provide the
technical analysis. RAND did not examine these secondary sources and their methodologies in
their larger research.
All the above efforts, while paving the way for new grounds in research, have highlighted
a growing and very tangible need for more research to interpret aggregated mediated
interactions. More important, they have underlined the need for the development of a different
set of tools and multiple language analyses that take seriously the digital as an archive of primary
material.
I Vote #Tahrir
In 2012, I conducted a micro-study on the hashtag (#) Tahrir using an emergent method
of cultural analytics and the R-Shief media system—a body of work that coheres dissimilar
elements not into a single idea, but rather into a heterogeneous network. It may be difficult to
make direct correlations between the rise of revolutionary movements and the large-scale street
actions combined with the adoption of newly distributed communication practices around
information technologies. However, researchers can examine how verbal acts of protest can be
conceptualized, facilitated, staged, ignored, negated, or thwarted in a culture of accelerated
mediation. And they can acknowledge the potential fragmentation of publics, the seeming
disappearance of the civic, and, possibly, the dissolution of the nation-state in the shifts of
globalization.
12
Tahrir (Arabic for “Liberation”) Square is a public space with historic significance.
Symbolically, it represents a message of liberty for the people of Egypt. In 1881, the Egyptian
army officer Colonel Ahmad Orabi led a military unit from what is now called Tahrir Square,
where he gave his memorable speech in front of the ruler of Egypt, Khedive Tawfiq. In this
speech were his famous words: “Our mothers bore us free men.” On 25 January 2011, this
symbolic location became the primary destination for an ensuing series of protests.
From the resignation of Former President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 through the
time of the election of Mohamed Morsi in June 2012, though the Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces (SCAF) effectively ruled the country, a sense of leaderlessness and instability purveyed
among many Egyptians. During this transition period, the Egyptian military shifted from its
original peacekeeping role to violent action against civilians. On the fifty-ninth anniversary of
the 1952 Revolution, July 23, 2011, the Abbasiyya neighborhood of Cairo was the site of
confrontations between armed civilians and hundreds of protesters, marching from Tahrir Square
to the headquarters of the ruling SCAF. Security forces blocked the streets and fired teargas at
the protesters. Violent clashes continued through the summer and, in October 2011, the massacre
of predominantly Coptic protesters in Maspero circulated widely on YouTube. On November 21,
2011, the Egyptian cabinet resigned amid a rise in deadly clashes and a week before
parliamentary elections. The violence continued, and clashes erupted in Abbasiyya again in late
April 2012, a month before the presidential elections that brought President Morsi to power.
40
When charting various hashtags, it seemed evident that Twitter users had been imagining
Tahrir as a nationalist trope for the revolution. For instance, Figure 1—a longitudinal study
(April 2011 through February 2012)—illustrates the rise of Egypt-related tweets during the
November clashes on #Tahrir, specifically. When looking at a year of tweets, the spike on
13
#Tahrir tweets on November 21, 2011 is notable. Other related hashtags did not spike as high.
And, in Figure 2, we see #Tahrir tweets consistently contain a higher percentage of Arabic-
language content than other similarly symbolic hashtags, such as #Jan25 and #Egypt. Also, there
are more dramatic increases and decreases in the activity of #Tahrir tweets, which might indicate
the newfound role for Tahrir as a nationalist icon.
Figure 1. This graph resulted from a collaborative study of nearly 25 million tweets from twelve
hashtag feeds. It is a longitudinal study over one year comparing twelve hashtag streams. Created
by VJ Um Amel, 2012.
Even as organizational formations and technologies of mediation in Egypt have changed
over the last several years, the call for human dignity and social justice has remained unchanged.
The images in Figures 1 and 2 are an introduction, intended to give a general idea of different
ways we can better understand the terms of these cultural productions and people who self-
14
identify as Egyptian or Arab, rather than identify with a specific place with geographic
boundaries.
Figure 2. This is a graph representing daily percentages of Arabic versus English in tweets from
six hashtag feeds on Egypt and one on Gaza. Created by VJ Um Amel, 2012.
The Open Source Movement in Egypt (2004-2007)
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we clearly had moved from the
world of ‘new’ media to a world of ‘more’ media. When we reached 2011 and the Egyptian
uprisings, the ubiquity of computers, digital media software, and computer networks had led to
an exponential rise in the numbers of cultural producers worldwide. No longer simply a matter of
the rise of new media production in new global contexts, these social media platforms served as
the database architectures for the accumulation of data on a scale heretofore unknown and, more
important, distributed among people in faster and more mobile ways.
This over-proliferation of data challenges the standard research methodology—the
impossibility of knowing or representing such a mass of information requires new ways of
15
investigating and interpreting. In just a few years, a plethora of articles and books on the Arab
uprisings were published and trillions of Twitter and Facebook postings were micro-blogged in
multiple languages. Though social media is often considered co-authored by the public, much
research on ‘the Arab public’ has focused on political histories,
41
public opinion through
traditional polling,
42
or ethnographic investigations.
43
In this regard, researchers have tended to
ignore and therefore undercut the mechanisms for verification and authority within the domain of
the digital. Digital knowledge production is not like traditional vox populis or public texts, such
as newspapers or legal documents. Rather, it offers a redefinition of ‘the public’” as societies
systematically engage more with and through the Internet, open-source transactions, and mobile
devices, for example, and is worthy of rigorous study.
The history of Egypt’s technological infrastructure emerged from a broader political and
economic condition that grew over decades. Internet started in Egypt in 1993 with a cable
connection to France of a 9.6 kbps bandwidth to the Egyptian Universities Network and the
Cabinet Information & Decision Support Center (IDSC), with the National Telephone
Organization (predecessor of Telecom Egypt) providing the infrastructure. The number of users
at that time was estimated to be between two and three thousand.
44
In 2000, the growth of IP providers offered basic infrastructure. The year 2004 witnessed
the rise of political parties like the Kafeya movement, who used both websites and online
journalism to campaign. As recently as 2006, developers were still building applications to
enable Arabic characters on a keyboard. Several open source projects to develop software for
Arabic on Drupal, Yamli, Google, and other platforms enabled Arabic-language content to grow
dramatically in the years to follow.
16
By 2004, two important movements in Egypt had emerged: the open source software and
localization movement, and the Kefaya political party and movement. Kefaya made its first
public appearance in December 2004, when more than fifty people gathered outside the attorney
general’s office, making demands far beyond the established boundaries of free expression for
the time. Their banners read, “Down with Hosni Mubarak,” and ”The Egyptian Movement for
Change.” The group went on to organize a series of protests pressuring the regime to make
concessions. Although the protesters in those days were few, their protests were remarkable
because they gained heavy media coverage outside Egypt. It was the first time since the 1970s
that Egyptians had raised banners demanding the resignation of a president.
Founded also in 2004, Open Craft is one of Egypt’s prominent web building companies
that, according to their website (http://open-craft.com), supports “the values of the open source
movement to provide Drupal Web application development: implementation, integration,
and internationalization.”
R-Shief’s involvement with the Arabic open source movement began in 2007. Building a
prototype of a bilingual Arabic digital archive positioned the project in a growing network of
Arab techies and activists in the region. This network exchanged information and techniques. At
this point, R-Shief was using the open source content management system (CMS), Drupal.
45
Founder of SuperMama, Zeinab Samir, and activists Manal Bahey al-Din Hassan, Maggie
Osama, and Mira Loutfi also worked at Open Craft.
R-Shief’s prototype was built in Drupal. Developing R-Shief BETA led to productive
meetings and collaborations with Egyptian techie, activist and blogger, Alaa Abd El Fattah, and
the Tunisian technologist and blogger, Slim Amamou, who was deputy to the Minister for Youth
and Sports under the transitional government in 2011. He resigned the week of 25 May 2011, in
17
protest of the transitional government's blocking of several websites. In 2008, Manal Bahey al-
Din Hassan, software engineer and trainer, and Benjamin Doherty, Drupal programmer and web
developer of the online publication, The Electronic Intifada, came on board to work on the R-
Shief project. Together Hassan, Doherty, and I built the first version of R-Shief BETA as an
Arabic archive.
Drupal development in Arabic (right-to-left RTL programming and UTF-8 encoding for
Arabic script) grew tremendously in the years that followed, with over fifty software developers
contributing to Drupal’s open source platform.
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One of the Arabic Team administrators for
Drupal is blogger and activist, Alaa Abd al-Fattah, who posted the following biography on his
profile:
From his work with children using Facebook to ridicule their teachers in the Arab digital
expression camps, to his work with pro-democracy activists using blogs to mobilize
thousands of Egyptians against the government in the Kefaya movement, Alaa just loves
helping people use ICTs to stick it to the man. By day he works as a Free/Open Source
Software developer, by night he dons his mask and cape and patrols the streets of Cairo,
jumping from campaign to campaign, building websites, providing support and training,
looking out for activists in need. He likes to pretend that his work on the Egyptian Blogs
Aggregator helped bring in a new era of citizen journalism and usher in a new generation
of digital activists, while the rest of the world acts as if his blog is relevant.
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One thing Alaa was mistaken about was that his work did not “pretend” to “bring in a
new era of citizen journalism.” In fact, this work did “usher in a new generation of digital
activists.” Between 2004-2011, the rise of the Arab blogosphere demanded attention. Alaa’s blog
posts swayed like a pendulum between RSS aggregators and the Egyptian constitution. He was
first jailed in 2006 along with other bloggers while calling for an independent judiciary in Egypt.
At the same time, citizen journalist Noha Atef also began blogging a crucial website called
“Torture in Egypt;”
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Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004; and Twitter first launched in
2006. This is also the era when the largest forum on the Internet, globally, was a community for
18
Egyptian women called Fatakat. From 2008-2010, bloggers continued to report on more violence
by the state and growing social unrest. One of the key turning points was when the Alexandria
police beat Khaled Said to death in June 2010.
Building an Arabic Media System
With more than eighteen billion tweets and millions of online articles posted since 2008,
the unique features of the R-Shief dataset are its size and its historical depth. The growth of
corpus-based lexicography
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and corpus linguistics showed that large collections of data
concerning language significantly alter the conclusions that can be drawn and the quality of the
material available to provide evidence for those conclusions.
50
In addition, this body of work
noted the significant difference between what people say or believe they do, and what they
actually do. Equally, when it comes to a diachronic understanding of conceptual and cultural
influences, it has been usual for students of the history of ideas or cultural analysis to choose
narrow sets of material even if analyzed over longer periods of time, largely due to the
substantial challenge of addressing wider quantities of material.
Recent research on social networks and micro-blogs has tended to be based on relatively
limited samples of data, usually restricted to a few days or weeks of data.
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Even when
researchers use a greater quantity of data, the techniques employed focus on network structure
and frequencies rather than on the concepts and ideas. R-Shief provides the opportunity to
examine research questions from a number of perspectives simultaneously. The quantity of data
allows an analysis of the networks between different actors, not just as a snapshot at one time but
also as they develop and grow. For example, R-Shief can trace the growth of re-tweets of a
particular actor or set of actors over time, thus acquiring a diachronic representation of network
19
structure. The depth of time in the dataset allows us also to trace the development of ideas using
methods from corpus linguistics (collocations, phraseology) and information extraction (IE). The
quantity of data also allows for appropriate tests of statistical significance when specific
questions necessitate it. While there is a growing body of Arabic language analysis tools, Arabic
remains under-researched with respect to the tools and systems available for language analysis.
The use of R-Shief allows researchers to pose questions that arbitrary snapshots of time segments
(even if focused on specific relevant communities) would not permit. The size of the dataset
furthermore provides a certain methodological validity that would be difficult to obtain under
other circumstances.
There are two important elements of R-Shief’s media system that have enabled it to
produce meaningful insight into Arabic language content and real on-the-ground events. The first
is that R-Shief’s analytics draw from its heterogeneous architecture composed of many different
platforms: Twitter by hashtag and by user, Facebook public pages, video and YouTube feeds,
Flickr feeds, blogs, websites, news feeds, e-publishing sites. This comprehensive archive offers a
breadth of historical information over five years that few other systems can claim.
Second, from the beginning, R-Shief has focused on providing analysis in foreign
languages. Using its sizable archive, R-Shief has been able to develop its own language detection
algorithm for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, English, French, German, and Spanish—character by
character. This data modeling method is an innovative type of computing known as machine
learning, where the machine learns from the size and material saved in its databases. It enables
researchers and scholars to examine digital media and its impact on social, political, and
economic events. These highlight some of the ways in which R-Shief responds to the palpable
20
and growing need to make the convergence of technological infrastructure and activists’
narratives legible.
Some researchers conduct poll interviews or survey television programs to analyze public
opinion. R-Shief anticipated looking at Twitter in its first beta launch in 2008, long before the
hashtag #Jan25 became a ubiquitous node for discourse analysis. By 2008, activists in the
Middle East had honed their work on and through Twitter. R-Shief was poised to archive public
sentiment as it was mediated and molded through Twitter. Like many research projects
examining big data, R-Shief began its research into social media by analyzing Twitter’s micro-
blogging platform. This has to do with the ease of Twitter’s data structure, its 140-character
word limit, Twitter’s accessible API, and its simple design. It is relatively easy to analyze
Twitter, as compared with Facebook, for example.
Since 2008, R-Shief has grown into a media system that has three distinct functions.
First, it archives digital media data in multiple languages—this includes a heterogeneous ecology
of datasets, not just Twitter. Second, it processes the scope of the data in terms of location, time,
language, semantics, sentiment, and frequency using its own language detection algorithms,
created by its developers. Third, it finds interesting data patterns across the ecology of networks.
The project resists collapsing its work into a single vector of analysis or explanatory narrative. It
aims instead to map crucial patterns that play out across all media forms and languages.
Through this mapping, R-Shief can to some extent verify Internet data. This knowledge
management system archives content that is written, posted, shared, and commented on by a
networked community. Individuals who participate in this community via list serves, social
networking sites, and professional networks receive hundreds of digital announcements on local
and regional developments throughout the Middle East.
21
R-Shief aggregates these local and regional missives to create a broad and expansive
living archive. This archive produced in local situations fosters a global transnational
conversation as it is read, reposted, circulated, discussed, refuted, contested, and expanded by
people across many regions. These geographically dispersed interlocutors are as integral to the
discourse as are those who are embedded in local situations.
Media Praxis
To amass an archive is a leap of faith, not in the function of preserving data, but in the
belief that there will be someone to use it, that the accumulation of these histories will continue
to live, and that they will have listeners and readers. In the contemporary world, there is an
archival impulse at work that represents something palpable – an opportunity to provide a
counter-collection, standing against the monumental history of the state. Such an impulse has
resulted in new public archives, individual projects, digital archives (including digitization of old
manuscripts, as well as collecting digitally-born information), fictional archival projects, and
collections of urban histories. This project critiques historical information on the contemporary
Middle East by engaging with independent archival projects that collect information currently
under siege, in real time and place, as cultures change and are lost in conflict. Recent scholarship
has taken the subject of the archive and investigated it as a cultural object in and of itself. In
2013, two distinct journals from separate fields of study, the Journal of Visual Culture and the
Arab Studies Journal, each dedicated an entire issue to the archive.
The second chapter chronicles R-Shief’s development from a digital archive to a media
system producing substantive analytics. This chapter documents the various friction points
between activism and state securitized agencies that the experience and practices of R-Shief
22
revealed from 2008 to 2014. What is the logic behind creating an independent, open source,
digital archive? How might archives engage with the public and public institutions? Or how
might research that draws from the press and cultural ephemera, rather than state documents and
‘official’ archives, tell a slightly different version of the story of modernism in twentieth-century
Egypt, for example, Joy Garnet’s Bee Kingdom archive of the works by Egyptian poet, Ahmed
Zaki Abu Shadi, or Hana Sleiman’s archives of the Palestinian National Movement collected
through informal networks. This dissertation intends to shed light on alternative appropriations
of ’the archive’ as a transformative site of knowledge production.
The third chapter discusses the set of research practices that emerge at the intersection of
both cultural and technical analytics in the fields of new media studies.
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This analytic approach
is born out of the contemporary socio-historical moment as we face new scales of information
that demand machinated computation and political influences on our cultural practices that are
systematic, transnational, and mobile. Similar to the non-linear narrative form of a NoSQL
database, data-driven narratives are also mapped relationally and within larger systems and
orders.
In the context of global uprising and using the moniker VJ Um Amel, I extended the
archive to create 3D games, generative art, remix video, data visualizations, and digital
performances that have shown internationally. These media productions aim to build worlds in
which the audience co-authors stories by extending networked narratives onto cinematic screens.
These interactive experiences also demonstrate how a database narrative might express meaning
through recombinant and indexical instantiations.
The fourth chapter returns to the question of the impact of social media on revolutionary
praxis. More than the accumulation of data, this chapter is concerned with public sharing among
23
global witnesses—a virtual body politic. The notion of witnessing culture is powerful. In some
respect and not incidental to the virtual body politic, the sharing of tweets really broadens who
can be a witness, and allows us to understand a variety of solidarity networks that arise from
these actions. In McCluhan-esque terms, we extended our eyeballs to witness revolution as the
body politic in the legitimization dance of something unfolding. This chapter on a virtual body
politic also provides a close reading of two data visualizations, from Twitter conversations on
Egypt in 2011 and Gaza in 2014, in order to analyze the mobilization of information patterns
over time. These visualizations of Internet data are traces of an embodied moment of intentional
use of digital media. Every data point has an embodied analogue at some moment. And tweets
have a very particular (historically specific, location-specific) moment of origin that is
exceedingly tangled with material bodies. The aim is to determine what the emerging patterns
tell us about a virtual body politic.
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CHAPTER TWO
Emergence of R-Shief as a Multilingual Digital Archive
I conceived of R-Shief in 2008 in response to my experience working in publications and
multimedia production at Georgetown University, a DC-based film company called Quilting
Point Productions, and a media collective, the DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency. I recognized two
emerging shifts, or friction points, on the scene that motivated me to build R-Shief.
The first was a growing number of posts in Arabic by bloggers in the Arab world using
the space as a site of information distribution and organizing, and the emergence of social media
personas throughout the Arabic speaking world. In Gaza, the activist @Gazamom rose into the
public eye through her tweets on the 2008 war. She introduced me to Twitter.
At the same time there were prestigious academic institutions already beginning to
analyze this blogosphere. As mentioned earlier in chapter one, researchers at Harvard’s Berkman
Center for Information and Society published the groundbreaking article, “Mapping the Arab
Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent,” in which they included attractive data
visualizations; however, nowhere in the article do they reference the blogs themselves. It seemed
they had not read the blogs they analyzed. Their map (Figure 3) represents ways to identify the
bloggers in circumscribed categories not necessarily parallel. For example, who are the “secular
reformists,” and how is that category parallel to “Egypt” or “Islam Focus” or “Kuwait Arabic” or
“Muslim Brotherhood”? These categories are misleading. They lump all of North Africa as
“Maghreb/French” and provide no textual analysis of the actual writings.
Unfortunately, these two trends—one organized by activists and one by academics—
seemed to run parallel to each other rather than converging. By providing both tools and analysis
25
Figure 3. Network graph of Arab blogosphere published in Mapping the Arab Blogosphere
article by Etling et al. the Harvard Berkman Center (2009).
through R-Shief, my research works to fill this critical gap between academics and activists. This
problem in scholarship continues till today. An edited volume that came out in late 2014 (not
peer-reviewed), Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring,
53
republished the original 2009
26
Berkman Center article with no critical reflection on its lack of textual analysis. This brings into
urgent question the standards in this field. How can academics repeatedly engage with the
Berkman Center’s article on “Arab Blogosphere” (which even includes the word “culture” in its
subtitle) as a scholarly work, when the writers of the article did not discuss the contents of a
single primary source?
Perhaps one reason they did not analyze or read the blogs is because most of the blogs are
in Arabic—which is the second motivation for creating R-Shief. More specifically, it was crucial
to overcome problems of web accessibility inherent in Arabic fonts. There was a time, right
before the Arab blogosphere developed, when we could not get the Arabic glyph encoded for
web interfaces. And we could not get those interfaces to read from right to left. These two basic
limitations presented quite a challenge from both technological and visual design perspectives,
and took some time to resolve. One problem was that the Arabic glyph appeared much smaller
than the Roman glyph. In developing a bilingual site, it was very difficult to design the Arabic
legibly without the English looking dramatically large. That relationship between the Arabic and
English text is reminiscent of the English language’s power in the Internet’s early years. Later,
open source projects like Wikipedia and Drupal worked to change that. This is an interesting
friction point between technology and scholarship. From its inception, R-Shief stood at the
intersection of art, technology, and scholarship.
Arabic Localization/Language
Since 2008, providing revolutionary and innovative software developments in the Arabic
language has been at the core of R-Shief’s purpose. R-Shief offers one of the largest collections
of Arabic tweets and hashtags on the global uprisings, with particular attention to Egypt. The
27
production of R-Shief as an Arabic archive, in theory, should allow us to engage in social media
in the actual language people speak (unlike what Etling et al. did in the Arab Blogosphere
project).
This disparity reveals the lack of engagement and access to the primary language of
materials on the global uprising. Accessing primary materials in their native language is core to
scholarship—it allows academia to raise the standards of what we think about social media, and
elevates the scholarship and expectations from people who study social media to a set of
standards.
Arab digital activists addressed this issue, among others, in a very interesting email
thread on the Arab Techies email listserv in September 2012. Sami Ben Gharbia, Slim Amamou,
and Alaa Abd El Fattah expressed grievances to University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab when they
approached activists on the listserv for data towards “open and collaborative research.”
It seems like there is a new field in academia that uses the "newness" of the Internet as
an excuse to get rid of the guidelines, ethics and traditions developed in the humanities,
so we get results published without tools, algorithms or data, makes one wonder how any
peer review is possible...Much of this would be mitigated if local academia was not
ignored, why seek stewards among practitioners and not engage with local universities
and researchers? Sure our brown universities are as messed up as our brown lives here in
the brown south but I assure you the difficulties in working with them are nothing
compared to the difficulty of doing accurate research without their understanding of the
context.
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What Ben Gharbia, Amamou, and Abd El Fattah are alluding to is a need for academia to
shift, from building tools that further reinforce hegemonic divides between cultures and peoples,
to building tools that extend the work and agency of local digital activists themselves. R-Shief
works towards that by building the foundation for algorithmic computation in Arabic and other
Middle Eastern languages. One of the early algorithms R-Shief developed was a language
analytic that detects language character by character. Today, R-Shief collects social media
28
content in over seventy languages. R-Shief’s tools allow users to see the big picture and
understand what concerns the Middle East, and also allow users to filter through tweets by
language. These tools allow multilingual users direct access to tweets on issues of political
mobilization.
One significant insight that emerges over time is the high percentage of Arabic language
content in social media on the Arab world. Any scholarly project that studies digital media or
social media on the Arab world must consider the Arabic content, which comprises eighty to
ninety-nine percent of posts on the region. Studying only the English language tweets is simply
not enough and will skew the results. In my visualized analysis of Facebook and Twitter users
(see Figure 12), for example, the case for why it is imperative to read the Arabic text is clear.
The January 25
th
Revolution in Egypt
R-Shief began mining Twitter by hashtag after a transformative workshop I attended in
May 2010, held for fellow women in Beirut by the Arab Techie organization. It was in
participation with these Arab techie activists that I grasped the significance of Twitter. My role
in this workshop was to produce a data visualization using the tweets posted during those few
days using the hashtag #ATWomen. However, I did not realize at the time that after seven days
Twitter no longer made those posts available on their public API. It was at that moment that I
decided to archive Twitter by hashtag.
R-Shief’s Twitterminer began by collecting two hashtags: #Gaza and #Flotilla in August
2010, immediately after the first flotilla ship was denied entry into Gaza. So when the revolution
began in January 2011, R-Shief was already equipped with a system to harvest and analyse
Twitter. However, the system was not prepared for the scale of tweets, which necessitated
29
moving R-Shief's Twitter analysis from a shared server onto a stable cloud computing system.
The transfer was successfully completed by February 2011, and R-Shief began to gather hashtags
such as #Jan25, #Tunisia, #Wikileaks. From that point until June 2013, R-Shief collected over
four billion tweets on 1800 hashtags. Meanwhile, the debate on the interplay between the
application of structure and resistance has been transformative.
Figure 4. Semantic Analysis of #Jan25 uses tweets archived with the hashtag #Jan25 during the
eighteen days of protests against the Mubarak regime.
The data visualization in Figure 4 conveys meaning by mapping words most associated
with each other through various conjunctions, prepositions, verbs, and articles. One insight that
emerges from this visualization was a prevailing sentiment that “video is history.” This powerful
statement retweeted a particular video over a thousand times in a matter of hours. It reflects the
growth of interconnectivity among YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. It also marks the beginning
of historically recorded events on citizens’ mobile phones that serve to mobilize communities
into political action, such as the 2014 video recording of the killing of Eric Garner and his
30
repeated gasping utterance, “I can’t breathe.” Finally, this interactive data visualization is a good
example of how computers can run semantic analytics on a set of strings (words). It is an
interactive experience that demonstrates how a database narrative might express meaning
through recombinant and indexical instantiations.
Sentiment Analysis
In January 2011, I had just begun as researcher in the first year of the Annenberg
Innovation Lab. I was in a meeting with IBM and the Lab about natural language processing of
Twitter using IBM’s software, when I first heard word of the January 25
th
Egyptian Revolution.
At the lab working with IBM, I was asked to help create sentiment analysis tools in Arabic.
Figure 5. This graph series represent sentiment analysis conducted in Arabic using IBM tools.
For complete description and interactive tool, see Arabic sentiment analysis on vjumamel.com.
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In the example shown in Figure 5, I worked with a team of developers from IBM to
modify their Natural Language Processing tools to work in Arabic. The bubble chart is meant to
graph public sentiment on potential presidential candidates—green signifies “positive” sentiment
and red signifies “negative” sentiment. Natural language processing techniques allowed us to
quantify data generated from roughly 500,000 tweets in June 2011 on #Egypt. While this graph
represents one of the only Arabic data visualizations—from the user to the graph—it still is not
accurate. Without paying much attention to the complicated derivatives in Arabic, I manually
created lists of about twenty positive and twenty negative words in Arabic to determine what
might be a positive or negative sentiment. Later in Cairo, when meeting with Algerian computer
scientist Taha Zerrouki, he explained to me a list of 13,000 stop words he created for a similar
project. My twenty words were simply inadequate.
Others in the lab went on to explore this further; however, my experiment using IBM’s
Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools was a failure—another friction point. I went to Cairo
that summer with these graphs, asking why these graphs portrayed Mortada Mansour as having
one hundred percent positive tweets (see Figure 6) when he was clearly the laughing stock of
Cairo. Apparently, the IBM tool I ran on the data was unable to detect sarcasm.
I eventually left the lab after a tumultuous summer in 2011. I will return to this point
later. Interest in using our tools was high among global power institutions such as the US State
Department, the intelligence community, and corporate interests. In July 2011, I returned to
Cairo for another Arab Techies workshop where I sought advice. The answer was to remain
transparent in my work, and continue to participate in Arabic open source software localization.
In 2012, I wrote a grant in Arabic to the Arab Digital Expression Foundation in Cairo to build an
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Figure 6. This sentiment analysis was conducted on English tweets posted in June 2011 with the
hashtag #Jan25. The size of the bubbles represents the volume of tweets.
open source Arabic Text Analysis API for techies and activists. By the time we built and
launched the API in 2013, the counterrevolution had seized power in Egypt. The open source
movement had lost several activists to imprisonment based on newly invented anti-protest laws,
and the death of Ali Shaath, a leading activist in the open source movement and founder our
granting organization, was another blow. Similarly, the global open source movement had lost
Aaron Swartz a few months earlier.
R-Shief 2.0
On 10 June 2011, R-Shief released the second version of its system (see Figure 7). The
press release, titled “New R-Shief Web Site Tracks Arab Public Opinion in Real Time,” read:
33
The new R-Shief.org site provides real-time analysis of opinion in the Arab world about
late-breaking issues. R-Shief uses an interactive map to allow users to slice through
aggregate web, Facebook, Twitter, and other data in order to analyse what Arabs are
saying about the issues that impact them. Users can see which posts are gaining the most
traction and which topics are dominating the chatter on Twitter and Facebook. R-Shief
provides this analysis by sorting through thousands of Twitter feeds and other sources
and using multiple search criteria to determine the most talked-about topics and issues.
The site also parses this data in order to produce visual representations that help untangle
the different threads of the social conversations taking place in Egypt and elsewhere. A
series of sentiment and semantic analyses are being produced with the support and
collaboration of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.
Figure 7. This is a screenshot of the R-Shief 2.0 homepage from June 2011.
R-Shief rapidly grew from a digital archive to a complex media system, collecting and
analyzing from social networking sites using innovative techniques that involved machine
34
learning. In 2011, R-Shief had developed an algorithm using its own immense data repository
that enabled the system to recognize the language of a tweet based on the series of characters in
the tweet.
A common definition of big data, by business analyst Doug Laney, points to three key
qualities of such data mentioned earlier: volume, velocity and variety. This has larger theoretical
implications. Indeed, big data is a poor term to describe the storage and analysis of large and or
complex data sets using techniques such as NoSQL, which R-Shief implemented in the 2013
version of its archive, along with the earlier machine learning technology.
By 2014, the methodological shift to using big data in textual analysis in the humanities
has meant a shift from big data to smart data—or big, smart data. While these quantitative
analytics of the here and now are considered computationally innovative, they are like the
subordinate clause that does not stand on its own when studying cultural phenomena such as
protest movements, uprisings, and other social, political, and linguistic practices. This
dissertation, “From Archive to Analytics: The R-Shief Media System and the Stories It Tells,”
situates such technology alongside historical and theoretical contexts through a critical art
practice of live video performance, visual art, digital art, network analysis, and written text.
Double-edged Technology: The Fall of Qaddafi in Libya
By August 2011, R-Shief had collected a massive database of Arabic-language tweets
during the Arab uprisings. We were using a machine-learning tool to aggregate data and identify
its patterns, and we were lauded by the US State Department
55
for predicting the fall of Tripoli.
To understand how the iterative, procedural design process works in the mediated reproduction
of culture is the manifestation of a technological imagination. In her book, Designing Culture,
35
Anne Balsamo articulates a vision of technology that is “best understood as assemblages of
people, materialities, and possibilities...of a double-edged nature—both determined and
determining; autonomous and subservient to human goals.”
56
She calls this vision the work of a
“technological imagination” that is, on the one hand, reiterating the past and, on the other,
innovating new assemblages. Again it is in these difficult friction points—the double-edge of
technology—where change and new knowledge is not only created, but also experienced.
This brings me to the core of the challenges I have faced in building this revolutionary
project. It exposed to me the disturbing power of these technologies, demonstrated when states
and institutions quickly maneuver to control them while activists fight to make these
technologies public.
In the summer of 2011, I was also invited by the US State Department to talk about social
media analytics to a public made up of the US intelligence communities, State, Congress, and US
Foreign Service officers. What ensued was quite interesting. A month after I had visited
Washington, and after many US government officials had signed up on R-Shief’s SMS and
mailing list, in August 2011, I received a text message from a colleague in Cairo. He informed
me that the rebels in Libya had overtaken a small town near the capital, Zawiya, and that they
were now heading to Tripoli. He wanted to know what the tweets were saying.
In 2011, “now” was the one word that caught my attention as I surveyed millions of
Twitter postings in real time on Libya. It surged like a pulse as tweets streamed out of Libya in
the throes of the Arab uprisings, as shown in Figure 8. I used R-Shief’s machine-learning tool to
aggregate data and identify a pattern that suggested that Tripoli would fall to the rebels within
eighteen to thirty-six hours. I sent that statement out on R-Shief’s mailing lists, and it thus went
to all those government officials I had just met.
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Figure 8. This is a word cloud of the top tweets used in the prediction of the fall of Tripoli on 22
August 2011. For complete description and interactive tool, see blog post on r-shief.org.
As it turns out, this predictive analysis was off by six hours, and was publicly lauded by
the US State Department at an address at Stanford later that fall.
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The activists with whom I
began this project were being put under surveillance or imprisoned. The US State department
was not my intended public audience. How had I ended up on the media page of the US State
department? The project had begun with the intersections of artists and techies imagining a new
world. It then archived various communities of knowledge producers as they organized solidarity
networks on national, regional, and international levels. The possibilities seemed endless. But
one of these possibilities was that states would be just as invested and interested in the potential
for this immense repository.
Media System Design
R-Shief, Inc. has developed a knowledge management system, or a media system, that is
telling a story nobody else is telling with social media data, using its collections of social media
data from the Arab uprisings and Occupy movements from 2008 through 2014. R-Shief offers
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three collections of multilingual Internet posts, along with tools to analyse and visualize the
content. It is a living ‘big data’ repository in terms of volume, velocity, and variety intended for
research, art, and activism. The R-Shief 3.0 (current model as of 2014) is designed to support
development in three key areas: the archive, the gathering and mining tools, and the education
necessary to use the archive.
(1) THE ARCHIVE
R-Shief has archived three collections of multilingual Internet posts from the Arab uprisings
and occupy movements from 2008 – 2014.
• Facebook, YouTube, and Websites (2008 – 2013)
• Twitter by Hashtag (2010 – 2013) (see Figure 9)
• Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (in real time over the last 30 days)
Figure 9. This is a 3D visualization of R-Shief’s Twitterminer tool, active from 2010 through
2013. It shows the top twenty hashtags collected over a 48-hour period. Each column represents
an hour.
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(2) TOOLS
Kal3a (the Arabic word for castle) is our name for the application stack that collects,
stores and indexes the social media data behind R-Shief’s research.
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This is the theoretical
foundation from which R-Shief has developed its collection system and its Arabic Entity
Extraction Engine. Kal3a is an infrastructure that collects and stores an ever-growing volume of
social media data. It is built around standard APIs and protocols so that other tools and
visualizers can work alongside our search interface. Kal3a’s archives combine two of R-Shief’s
legacy collections of millions of Arabic and English social media posts created since August
2010. Before Kal3a, R-Shief collected social media data using PHP scripts, which polled feeds
and API endpoints and stored the responses in MySQL databases. Over time, as developers used
different software, data was stored in different places, in different formats and sometimes
duplicated. Highly developed tools such as the Twitterminer were responsible for data collection,
storage, and visualization all at the same time, which created data silos. The requirements of a
specific visualization created assumptions about how data should be collected, which in turn
imposed a cost on reusing the data if we wanted to analyze or visualize it some other way in the
future.
Elasticsearch is behind our faceted search index. It interfaces directly with CouchDB (a
NoSQL database) and indexes every new or changed item. It returns the tweets you search for
and provides the capability for sorting by users, languages, and sources. Kal3a supports the R-
Shief Trends Widget, Search API, The Historical Hashtag Visualizer, and Real-time Visualizer
(see, for example, Figures 10 and 11).
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Figure 10. This is a screenshot of R-Shief’s Hashtag Trends Widget. This widget measures
trending words in real time and can be embedded anywhere as an iframe.
Arabic Text Analysis API uses Wikipedia as its knowledge base to show various
occurrences of Arabic words in Wikipedia. It provides contemporary linguistic analysis of
Arabic and is a foundational step in our development of an Arabic Smart Engine. The component
is available to try out in the demo form, or as a web API.
The Instagram Geolocator API allows you to use your finger to circle a part of a
geographical map, and returns to you all the Instagram posts taken in that location.
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Figure 11. This is a screenshot of R-Shief’s Historical Hashtag (#) Visualizer. It allows you to
see the top words used over any date range. It also provides frequency counts of retweets, users,
and other hashtags.
(3) EDUCATION
Two experimental teaching collaborations conducted in 2013 and 2014 at the Washington
University in Saint Louis and Towson University used R-Shief’s tools. In both instances, R-Shief
provided primary sources of social media for undergraduate courses on the Arab uprisings.
Students were asked to research a major paper using traditional and non-traditional sources. One
of the preparatory assignments required them to use the digital archive’s Twitterminer tool,
which could aggregate tweets over a particular period of time on a particular topic of the
students’ choosing. Students’ task was to make sense of the content in the tweets over various
time periods. The instructor shared the students’ experiences using the digital archive’s
Twitterminer and their ability to interpret social media content and transform it into narrative
prose. We expect students to meet challenges and success with this digital archive, ranging from
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their ability to navigate the site, to their ability to interpret tweets as a primary source, to their
ability to category shift from social media to academic narrative.
As a companion to this work, I am currently building an education portal on R-Shief.org.
This portal provides interactive teaching modules and resources for workshops conducted
internationally. I have begun developing teaching modules for undergraduate college courses on
Middle East Internet Studies, Data Visualization, and Social Media Analysis. These interactive
teaching modules include lesson plans, and syllabi on topics such as Computational Arts,
Information Visualization, Games and Apps, Designing and Hacking Systems, Global Media
Activism, Arab Media, and Arab Uprisings.
The Archival Intervention
This research engages a set of methodologies that emerge at the intersection of both
cultural and technical analytics. To help understand this hybrid negotiation, I have developed
several principles that should inform our work in the field:
1. Technologies are not objective, accurate, or void of political or cultural formations.
I have expressed concerns over Arabic software localization – which is a means of
adapting computer software to different languages and regional differences. At an even deeper
level, the shift in programming from using C++ (a highly mathematical computer language) to
using Java (a computer language that contains lots of English-based vocabulary) has meant a
shift into what is culturally English-based. The academic field of Internet Studies is so young,
however, that its ethical standards and traditions are still under debate. Results are often
published without public access to the data or tools used in the analysis. Critiques of race, power,
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and colonialism are rarely brought into studies on how, for example, Egyptian activists have used
Silicon Valley tools to design their own virtualities specific to local culture and history.
As recently as 2006, developers were still building applications to enable Arabic
characters on a keyboard. Several open source projects to develop software for Arabic on Drupal,
Yamli, Google, and other platforms enabled Arabic-language content to grow dramatically in the
years to follow.
Over the past decade or more, there has been a movement towards software localization
in Arabic among Arab programmers. Earlier, there was a huge concerted effort to get RTL
working to UTF-8 for Arabic script, as mentioned earlier (Chapter 1) in the history of the open
source movement in Arabic. There were also projects like Kalimaat, Yamli, GNOME, and other
tools that served translation. There are activist platforms such as Katib and Take Back the Tech
(to end violence against women) based out of Lebanon. A great deal of work has gone into
Arabic language analyses, from e-Space's Arabic Morphological Analyser, to Taha Zerrouki's
Arabic conjugator project, Qutrub (qutrub.arabeyes.org). At R-Shief.org we are building an
Arabic Smart Engine. In December 2013, R-Shief released the alpha of its Arabic Text Entity
Extraction API that we built using the lexicon in Wikipedia, which was one of the first
crowdsourced platforms to work in Arabic. We are working towards building artificial
intelligence in Arabic—which is still steps behind AI in English. What does this say about the
Arabic user and digital literacy rates?
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2. It is not effective to study only English language posts when researching Arab social media.
Any scholarly project that studies digital media or social media on the Arab world must
consider the Arabic content which comprises eight to ninety-nine per cent of posts on the region.
In the visualized analysis of Facebook users in Figure 12, for example, the case for why it is
imperative to read the Arabic text is clear.
Figure 12. This is from a study conducted using R-Shief data analytics from more than six
million Facebook users online from 2011 through 2012. These users have posted on ten public
pages that concern Egypt’s uprisings, such as “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook public page.
R-Shief is concerned with Arabic script on the web being optimized and integrated with
other languages. In the first BETA prototype, the menu and user-interface for the content-
management-system were manually translated and uploaded. R-Shief was first conceived to offer
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one platform—a website—where activists, scholars, and new media artists can archive, discuss,
and visualize ‘global cultural flows’
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in the Middle East and its diaspora in various languages
(initially Arabic and English, and later Turkish, Hebrew, and Farsi). In response to the
dominance of English-language media, R-Shief’s accessibility to speakers of various languages
initiates transformational change in information sharing and becomes meaningful to various
communities and disciplines, ultimately affecting the terms on which cultures interact.
From issues with Arabic characters on the screen, to more complicated semantic
technical inaccuracies, the work in Arabic software development still has much room to learn
and grow. One example of an interesting failure in sentiment analysis occurred in 2011 in Cairo.
In preparation for a conference at the American University in Cairo in June 2011, I prepared
sentiment analyses (English and Arabic tweets separately) on likely Egyptian presidential
candidates based on a month of Twitter posts that included the hashtags #Jan25 and #Egypt.
Abdel Moneim, Abou El-Fotouh, Hisham Bastawisi, and Amr Moussa were among the
candidates who remained in the race through the first round, while candidates who were
referenced in larger volumes of posts, such as Mohamed el-Baradei and Naguib Sawiris, dropped
out earlier.
3. As I mentioned earlier, big data is notable not due to its size, but because of its relationality to
other data.
The challenge to normalize uneven data inputs into one system or database requires
building a network where each data point has its position and function in relation to all the other
data points. When the size, speed, and variety of the data reaches a threshold, new, creative
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methods are developed to keep all the pieces working together. The traditional table of rows and
columns is not always the most efficient way to store and process data. It is in the relationality of
the data points to each other where machine learning can take place and programs can be built to
be “smart.”
This is the theoretical foundation from which R-Shief has developed its collection system
and its Arabic Entity Extraction Engine. Kal3a collects data from various providers (Twitter,
web site and Facebook feeds, other databases, CSV files), archives the data in its original form,
normalizes the disparate data structures to a common data standard (Atom entry documents), and
stores this normalized form in a database. Kal3a also provides a web interface for searching the
database, configuring the collection parameters (the RSS feed URLs, keywords tracked on
Twitter), and displaying statistics about its collections.
The current Arabic Entity Extraction Engine under development is a Named Entity
Recognition system, based on Arabic Wikipedia. Rather than building a single dictionary, we are
focused on building a tool to periodically download and process Wikipedia dumps, and build an
updated dictionary regularly. We are also focused on the matching layer, the part of the engine
that will match text being analysed with the proper named entities in the knowledge base
previously prepared.
4. Visualizations of Internet data are not about claims about material bodies or the intentions of
communicators.
They are traces of an embodied moment of intentional use of digital media. Every data
point has an embodied analogue at some moment. And tweets, as a particular category of digital
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data, have a very particular (historically specific, location-specific) moment of origin that is
exceedingly tangled with material bodies.
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CHAPTER THREE
The Animations, 3-D Interactive Storytelling, Creative Coding, Live Cinema, and
Visualization of R-Shief’s Megadata
This chapter presents a basic genealogy of the development of the database-driven
research methodology, cultural analytics, within the emergent fields of new media studies. It
presents a series of 3D interactive videos, creating coding, visualization, and live cinema as new
ways to tell stories based on the data collected by the R-Shief media system. It also summarizes
the limitations of this approach as compared to other methods of media analysis. Despite these
challenges, how might we frame new cultural insights that we can glean from the deployment of
these methods as a way of understanding contemporary media culture?
The aim of this query is to map the patterns, stories, ideas, and analyses networked across
media forms. It is designed to refute the possibility of a monolithic narrative about contemporary
Egypt—a challenge that this query only begins to address. The methodology of R-Shief works
specifically at intersections—between cultural and technical analytics, theory and practice,
virtual and embodied practices, and many languages. These ideas are based in a multi-
dimensional approach, and thrive in situations where differences between modalities of
knowledge production, culture, and languages require one to straddle and translate these
differences into a cohesive form.
The medium of digital substance is computer code; the manner of its composition is
through words and images that can be interactive and animated; and its form is the posted digital
composition itself. Thus, to understand the gamut of factors in this emergent form and how in
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turn it can reflect behavior and ideas, such as political mobilization or peace and conflict
resolution, practitioners and scholars must take into account a host of variables.
Technologies such as R-Shief enable research projects that are large-scale, open-ended,
and interactive—international collaborative ventures in which scholars, activists, technical
experts, librarians, and academics work together. The goal is to attain cross-cultural
understandings that provide insight into the levers of influences across the globe. However,
studying and interacting in a networked culture requires fluency in interfaces and digital
software. Such literacy understands computational media at the level of its “rhetoric, aesthetics,
and poetics encoded in any work.”
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This language provides the conceptual framework for the
research presented here. I argue that a shared procedural literacy among collaborators in digital
and new media productions can provide critical insights into our contemporary culture and
behavior.
Short Genealogy of Cultural Analytics
In this chapter, the following modes of cultural analytics are presented as data
visualizations: semantic and sentiment analysis, frequencies over time, visual mosaics, network
drawings, interactive media, and video remixes. This chapter also summarizes the history of this
digital media approach and compares it to other methods of media analysis. Given these
challenges, this chapter interrogates how we can frame new insights from the deployment of
such methods.
Within an already emergent field of digital humanities and new media studies, cultural
analytics is a methodology employed by few and deliberated on by far fewer. There are virtually
no peer-reviewed essays, nor any books on this approach to date. There are only a couple of
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significant publications on cultural analytics, including a blog post by Kurt Ralske and an
interview of well-known new media theorist Lev Manovich. Aside from these, what remains are
just references to new media work by a handful of artists and, perhaps most famously, a proposal
for funding by Manovich, in which he outlines his vision in this trajectory.
It is no secret that cultural analytics, as defined and practiced by Manovich, grew out of a
large National Endowment for the Humanities grant. In his interview with the National
Endowment of the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities Manovich gave on the topic, he said,
“[my] idea of cultural analytics is related to the recently announced NEH Digital Humanities
Initiative, "Humanities High-Performance Computing" (HHPC), but there are some important
differences.”
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In the interview Manovich went on to distinguish his methods from a previous
NEH-funded initiative in several ways. First of all, he is not interested in “past cultures (the
traditional domain of humanities), but in contemporary cultural areas.” Secondly, while others
have focused on text, Manovich “plans to focus on visual media.” And finally, he explains his
desire to extend the visualization techniques “done today both by scientists and by artists and
designers” into building interface for computational analysis.
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Like database-driven publishing
platforms such as Vectors journal and Scalar, whose aim is to produce digital scholarship, the
tool developed in Manovich’s research project, ImagePlot, similarly aims to visualize collections
of images and video of any size for the production of digital scholarship, specifically in the field
of visual arts and culture.
While one of the intentions of Manovich’s project in cultural analytics is to create an
interdisciplinary interface/tool, the focus of his work is firmly rooted in the humanities where the
research receives its funding. Unfortunately, a lack of balance between interpretive debate and
technological production of the research flattens the significance in his analyses. For example,
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one of his early projects, One Million Manga Pages, produced groundbreaking visualizations of
millions of Japanese manga pages that were collected from an online site: OneManga.com.
However, the analysis presented did not provide much more information about the history of
mangas in Japan, nor the significance of this digital copying phenomenon in growing fan culture,
and it did not attempt semantic analysis of the these comics.
This is where more contextual analysis combined with computer analytics can provide
scholarship that produces studies in both context and genealogy, while remaining able to analyze
the digital structure itself across its ‘reproducibility’ and ‘spreadability.’ In circumstances and
conditions where technical and formal restraints make rhetorical rigor and evocative description
challenging, I suggest the alteration of preexisting forms of presentation and/or generation of
new forms.
Recently, Manovich published a nuanced reading of social media that builds on his
earlier work. In his latest piece, “Data stream, database, timeline (part 1),” he described a shift
from analyzing databases to analyzing data streams. “I want to suggest that in social media, as it
developed until now (2004-2012), database no longer rules. Instead, social media brings forward
a new form: a data stream. Instead of browsing or searching a collection of objects, a user
experiences the continuous flow of events,” argues Manovich.
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And though I do not necessarily
adhere to the same scope and definition of analyzing large-scales of cultural data as Manovich
does, I do agree that his pioneering efforts are critical as we move forward into progressively
greater scales of media production.
Future researchers should be cautioned to remain mindful of checks and balances between
contributions by culture theorists and technologists. In his article on the subject titled “What is
Cultural Analytics?” Kurt Ralske offers a description that may be seen as an imposition of the
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scientific method onto the humanities, implying that quantitative analysis can provide more
accurate, meaningful, and insightful commentary than qualitative analysis. He writes:
Meaningful measurements can be developed to help describe the qualities of a work, which
may be invoked to support a theoretical position. For example: one can reasonably theorize
that, ‘the films of director Michelangelo Antonioni are slower than those of Federico
Fellini.’ Cultural analytic techniques could verify this hypothesis conclusively, and even
provide a specific metric to quantify the exact difference in speed between the oeuvres of
the two directors.
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This overt bias overlooks the cultural nuances of human expression and decontextualizes
data, thereby endangering the accuracy of the analysis and strongly biasing the results. Such
methodological bias renders the quantitative approach just as subjective as the qualitative. It may
be useful to note that several quantitative methods of media analysis have failed in interesting
ways that offer valuable insight through practice-based research. In fact, the gross inaccuracies
themselves have led to new findings about using old methods of analyses on streams of social
media content.
Visualizing the “Now”
Philosophical underpinnings to the nature of a virtual world are neither new nor
revelatory; nor does this argument purport that the ‘what’ that is being expressed online in the
digital world is necessarily representative of what happens on the ground. In places like Egypt
where literacy rates reach only sixty-six percent,
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analyses of Internet penetration bear less
weight.
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However, elements of the virtual become actualized under unique, local, temporal
conditions that cannot be predicted. They happen only in the ’now.’ It helps to approach this
logic from a visual arts lens, as Laura Marks does in her book, Enfoldment and Infinity: An
Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, where she traces new media art along a historiography of
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Islamic thought from the birth of the algorithm in ninth-century Iraq through fifteenth-century
Islamic mysticism and neoplatonism, or “beginnings of virtual reality.”
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One of the critical
points Marks builds upon is a notion of events in time as unique and foldable, and therefore,
transformative. Taking it one step further, similarly, Kant’s nineteenth-century notion of the
‘sublime’ event can be transformative. For an event to be transformative, it relies on
unpredictable conditions. In other words, the act of Mohamed Bouazizi’s lighting himself on fire
in Tunisia was as sublime as it was horrible. The creative media projects below seek to illustrate
and improve our understanding of the sensibilities and cultural logic(s) that are being expressed
by the people on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.
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(Live Cinema) Video Remix
Figure 13. Flyer of Music, Freedom, and a Bit of Egyptian Cinema live VJ/DJ performance
hosted by Makkan Art Gallery sponsored by National Gallery of Art in Amman, Jordan.
In the live performance referenced in Figure 13, I played as VJ Um Amel with DJ Ma'at
at the National Gallery of Art in Amman, Jordan, for an evening of electronica and world beats
against a remixed display of several musicals from Egyptian cinema including Lahn el-Wafa'
(1955) starring Abdel Halim Hafez and Chadia, 'Afrita Hanem (1948) starring Samia Gamal and
Farid El-Atrache, and Fatma (1947) by Ahmed Badrakhan, with visualizations of social media,
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art, and design emerging from the revolutions of dignity spreading across the Middle East and
North Africa. The remixed data were drawn from the R-Shief media system and pay tribute to
the spirit and vision of the people.
Figure 14. This video remix, Women and Youth in Revolution, features spoken word
performance by Suheir Hammad and composed music by DJ Luckxe. It was recorded live on
February 5, 2011 and has garnered over ten thousand hits.
Using spatially designed information visualizations along with other representations, I
remix media to demonstrate a research methodology whereby one can capture temporally
specific conjunctures such that others can witness them. The particular remix shown in Figure 14
was inspired by a video of the young girl leading the chants in Tahrir square. When DJ Luckxe
contacted me on Facebook with a link to the dubstep and bass song he had just composed, there
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was more inspiration to make the remix. His dubstep technique allowed me to bring out the
techno-feminist cyborg in VJ Um Amel. Women and Youth in Revolution is a recording of a live
VJ session during which I edited the clips in real time; the cube effects, the rotoscoping, the
layers and transitions—all were performed using real-time video processing software, VDMX
and patches. This is a very different process than post-production editing. Though the video is
raw, I find that there are certain poetics that emerge from real-time mixing.
Figure 15. Flyer for 14 February 2014 performance in Cairo, Egypt: see video and photo
documentation.
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February 14th, 2013, in Cairo, Egypt, was a hot night of community-driven
DJ/VJ/Poetry/and Hip-Hop performance. The goal of this interactive gig was to demonstrate,
share and circulate art + media + technology (see Figure 15). Our artistic intervention followed
on the heels of the #OpenEgypt efforts to support creativity and knowledge production with free
legal tools. The video documentation of the event garnered over 32,000 hits.
Figure 16. Venue for 8 February 2013 performance in Cairo, Egypt: see video and photo
documentation.
The previous week, on Friday, February 8, 2013, a few blocks from Tahrir Square at 22
Talaat Harb Street, VJ Um Amel joined @100Copies Music Squad for a night of experimental
live visual performance (see Figure 16). As protestors took to the streets, this group took to
cultural expression on the situation. VJ UmAmel: live visuals, Ismail Hosny: synth, Minus T:
samplers, laptop, Mahmoud Refat: turntables. The event was advertised as “a spectacular live
cinema event merging animation, visual media, and social media archives with live acoustic and
electronic music.” I collaborated with Cairo’s 100COPIES MUSIC squad, who provided live
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acoustic and electronic music. This performance spanned animation, experimental documentary
and abstract visual music. The cinematic venue came alive with large animation and
algorithmically programmed projections.
Figure 17. From Gaza to Cairo is a live cinema performance at the Collective Alchemy: Turning
Grief into Action at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics GSI Convergence in
2013.
The live VJ performance From Gaza to Cairo (see Figure 17) interrogated how do
networked communities turn grief into action? In the wake of the Trayvon Martin verdict, the
year 2013 saw communities turning grief into action on a huge scale. Yet this is also a science of
the oppressed that we frequently used, sometimes daily. How can we imagine collectivity in the
present moment, after new media, when connection is often mediated down to 140 characters,
coalitions are negotiated through Facebook, and embodied occupations of the streets have
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reinvigorated people around the world? The performance was one in an event that addressed
issues of lost children, uprisings in Egypt, immigration detention and anti-black violence.
(Visualization) Computational Drawings
Figure 18. VJ Um Amel, Rosetta Stones from Cyberspace (2011), are a series of network
visualization of tweets on #Egypt and #Syria during July 2011.
Rosetta Stones from Cyberspace (Figure 18) are sets of images created by writing
computer code. They draw upon R-Shief’s most rare and comprehensive archives of social media
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content from the Arab uprisings. This growing repository urgently seeks to critique historical
information on the contemporary Arab world—information currently under siege, in real time
and place.
When this project began it was exclusively about the archive as a repository for data. The
sheer speed and size of this substance is necessarily remarkable. My intentions shifted to offer a
new perspective on the microcosms within macrocosms of this world, somewhat unfinished, and
unknowable—to bring these complex representations of movements of billions of people with
many leaders together in a way that allows one to experience through the senses what cannot be
processed cognitively or rationally.
What these experiments in narrative have in common is that they start with a design of a
world rather than a storyboard of a script. At the core of this work is the reexamination of the
creative process itself, to discover and develop new ways of seeing, thinking, iterating and
collaborating. The process uses a non-linear workflow, an iterative process of prototyping ideas,
and an integrated virtual production methodology that uses twenty-first century design
perspective. By definition, world building expands the playing field of film production into a
landscape that includes not only screen-based media but also the interplay between passive and
interactive experience in a designed, engineering and performance space. It opens up the
possibilities for the future in cinema.
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Image Mosaics
Figure 19. VJ Um Amel, Riot Smoke (2012). See documentation.
Like the Rosetta Stones, the image mosaics also represent immense and unwieldy social
media activity, in this case, from 2011 to 2012. Figure 19, Riot Smoke, is comprised of profile
thumbnails from the top thousand Twitter users contributing posts on the hashtags #abbasseya,
#abasiya, #abassiya and Flickr photos with the same keywords ‘Abassiyya.’ The original
photograph was taken by Jonathan Rashad, which he makes available on his Flickr stream under
creative commons licensing. The caption reads: “6230 Riot CS Smoke, produced by US-based
firm ‘Combined Tactical Systems’. Used by police-backed ’thugs’ on May 2 against protesters in
Abbasiya near Egypt's Ministry of Defense.”
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In Figure 20, Walk Like an Egyptian, I gathered profile thumbnails from the top twelve
hundred members contributing to the Facebook page, ‘We are all Khaled Said’, from January
2011 to February 2012. Applying procedural techniques to manipulate color, chroma,
luminosity, scale, opacity, direction of this large scale of information, I composited the
thumbnail images to imitate the popular meme of the man holding up a sign that reads, “Kefaya”
(Enough), in reference to the political party.
These are expressively artistic interpretations of particular moments. The theoretical form
of these visual expressions is intentional—one single image is never the totality of the moment.
Instead, such iconic images come to stand for an infinite number of visual memories, some
recorded, most not. The use of the mosaic mode of ‘assemblage’ is intended to capture this
notion of the infinite, reiterative algorithmic form of any single visual expression.
These mosaics demonstrate yet another layer of encoding and decoding of the data. In
response to the fetishizing of technology, or data, or the Arab uprisings, they represent a secret
world of code in an abstract, algorithmic aesthetic, blown up and situated in and out of time. The
mosaic images are not literal representations of this body of text; they are a stand-in, a metonym
for it. Thus, the aesthetics of the work I am proposing also trace back to choices made while
creating the archive—understanding not only the text within the archive, but that the archive
itself is a text is also imperative.
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Figure 20. VJ Um Amel, Walk Like An Egyptian (2012).
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(Creative Coding) What the World Tweeted on #Egypt
Figure 21. What the World Tweeted on #Egypt is a running Java applet of all the tweets on
#Egypt that were posted to Twitter the day Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt.
The hashmap depicted in Figure 21 offers a sentiment analysis and is intended to be
evocative. It was designed to have a more poetic (and less narrative) meaning to express the
database. It also demonstrates how a database narrative might express meaning through
recombinant and indexical instantiations. I programmed it in Processing. Crunching the data was
not as straightforward as one might think, and I have only begun to consider the design
challenges associated with producing data visualization. Ideally, my process is to problematize
the project’s approach in order to get beyond the obvious and expected, i.e.: “Muslims” AND
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“Christians” combination. In other research, I conduct link analysis, term frequency analysis, and
network mapping based on themes and links, and if possible, identify primary grouping.
(3D Cinema) Tweetworld
Aesthetically, Tweetworld (see Figure 22) is an attempt to transform a 2D data
visualization into a 3D immersive environment.
Figure 22. Tweetworld is an interactive game in 3D. See video documentation.
This game prototype uses a representation of 500,000 Twitter posts on #Syria collected in
August 2011, and machine learning analytics that determine how many tweets were in Arabic
(green), English (blue), and French (red). The challenge was in connecting this 3D data
visualization directly to the live stream of tweets. The green waterfalls are Arabic tweets, the
blue waterfalls are English tweets, and the red ones are French tweets. The more elevated the
terrain, the more retweeting occurred. Your mission is to find the original tweet in each
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language. The winners get access to the data. The actual source data appear in comma delineated
(csv) tables that are easily downloadable. Users are able to download four distinct files for each
of the hashtags found. They appear in a database structure of rows and columns for the player to
use in any imaginative way.
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CHAPTER FOUR
A Virtual Body Politic: Mobilizing Information Patterns
“What is the next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.”
New York Times, November 16, 2010
The joint availability of massive social and cultural data sets (including social media and
digitized cultural artifacts) make possible fundamentally new paradigms for the study of social
and cultural activities and histories. Open source industry models, social media platforms, and
Arabic software localization have reframed access to information and justice in the Arab world.
But these changes have yet to be meaningfully analyzed or even accounted for by scholars
studying either social media or the societies in question.
This research is in fact one layer removed from the individuals and communities
themselves. This inquiry examines various assemblages of people in the virtual world through
their words, their sharing, and their posts online. By examining traces that people leave online
through posts, tweets, retweeting, and sharing, this chapter formulates and studies various
assemblages of people and their ideas—creating alternative geographies of movement and new
spatialities of information patterns. The question is not to identify “who” the people are
ontologically, but how they form networks of solidarity, and around production of knowledge, on
the Internet. This project studies the flows of cultural production and consumption in real-time,
so that the assemblages are in constant flux.
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
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the hermeneutics (text and context) of digital knowledge. The approach I use is to study this
knowledge production from social unrest and citizen action as it flows among transnational
actors from the earlier events in Egypt to a violent war against Gaza three years later. These two
particular events occurred over the summer, and received similar levels of international attention.
Both the Egyptian revolution and the attack on Gaza had regional implications, and the social
media conversation occurred in many languages. Another reason for comparing these two events
is to understand how various data visualization techniques can shed light on unique information
patterns and the mobilization of various information patterns.
This brings me to my point about a virtual body politic. I argue that it is the actual
material bodies that are writing the information patterns we read on social media. And with
social media, for the first time, we are seeing media being circumscribed by millions and
millions of users rather than by one state-run apparatus like a newspaper or television network.
These authors have become a plethora of different bodies—big ones, black ones, brown ones,
Muslim ones, atheist ones, queer ones, and all the variations. It is this largeness
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in daily
political movement and operations that is defining the social media production of knowledge. It
is revolutionary.
Another example of solidarity networks operating across differences is this photograph of
a young girl holding a sign that reads “Ferguson with love from Palestine” (Figure 23). On the
night of the no-indictment verdict of officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, on November
24, 2014, this photograph was the third most tweeted image among 650,000 tweets collected on
# Ferguson.
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Figure 23. This is the third most tweeted image in stream of tweets in #Ferguson on the night of
the no indictment charge of Darren Wilson. Image ranking analytics by Kal3a.
A difference between the body politic and the virtual body politic is that the former is an
abstraction of a group of people governed by one authority. More important, the latter is that
abstraction of people who exchange ideas publicly online about the governance of an authority
through visual representations of bodies as a site of political control. More than the accumulation
of data, in this discussion I am concerned with public sharing among global witnesses—a virtual
body politic. The notion of witnessing culture, while science gives us a means to speak about the
implications, is powerful. In some respects, and not incidental to the virtual body politic, the
sharing of tweets creates an “immediate publicity”
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, which really broadens who can be a
witness, who can be counted as a witness. This chapter presents a media-enhanced method of
scholarship, a media praxis, to analyze and demonstrate the negotiation between the materiality
(the analogue) and information patterns (the data points). In this context, virtuality itself is a
friction point between material bodies in political operation and information patterns.
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Cultural Research in the Petabyte Age
In his treatise, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin concluded
that when art loses the magical and ritual purpose from its own creation and is reproduced, it
negotiates a political dimension. At the end of his article, Benjamin provides a Marxist analysis
by intertwining the role of reproduced art reaching “the masses” and the Fascist “attempt to
organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure… [and by]
giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”
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Yet, in the era
of mechanical reproduction, we have moved to a theology of art for art’s sake, heightened in the
late nineteenth century with artists like Oscar Wilde. Benjamin uses the terms “cult of art/cult of
beauty” to depict a new group of recipients of the art, a wide audience. This point is also central
to his argument; also the way he negotiated the word, “aura.” Benjamin articulated the aura of a
piece of art to emanate from its own authenticity, as is bound to time, space, and circumstance of
its birth. If the emphasis of the art has shifted to its being relevant to a cult, a mass audience, then
it would be that audience (not the artist) who gives a piece its authenticity. I suggest that the aura
of a piece of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is found in its relationship/play/interaction
with its audience—and this is political.
In his work on contemporary Arab music during the 2011 revolutions, Mark LeVine
argues for a reconsideration of Benjamin’s notion of “aura.” From an Adornian perspective on
the globalized consumer society, LeVine argues that, within the context of revolution, music
played an important role “to awaken people from their ideological slumbers.”
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I would even
extend LeVine’s argument and add that social media allows its authors to express an emotional
register that exhibits and performs in a way similar to Benjamin’s aura.
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Nearly a hundred years have passed since Benjamin wrote his oeuvre, and we have
reached a situation nearly opposite the one in which Benjamin was theorizing. In our world, the
Petabyte Age, media is freely produced and endlessly circulated without explicit
commodification. In 2008, WIRED magazine recounted the history of digital computation:
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty
years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search
engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded
companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating
this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. Welcome to
the Petabyte Age. The Petabyte Age is different because more is
different. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder
analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to—and, at
petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. At the petabyte scale,
information is not a matter of three- and four-dimensional taxonomy
and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics.
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The Petabyte Age calls for an entirely different approach to cultural research. This
approach requires us to stop thinking about data as something that can be visualized in its
totality. Instead, it requires us to understand the data mathematically first; only later can we
begin to ask questions about context: people/place/time of data production.
In order to produce a database, bits of information are algorithmically processed and
fitted into a database structure that enables the data to be ‘read.’ This initial computational
processing does not do much to account for the context of the production of the original
information. Basically, it might tell us about the patterns of information but very little about the
meaning of this information.
When researching social media, for example, parameters such as time stamping or
geolocation offer pointers to the context of initial production, but in creating the database, the
virtual bits are dramatically decontextualized. The database creation process simply cannot easily
record the salient conditions of the production of the elements. Walter Benjamin might say that
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the aura of the data is unrecordable.
The methodologies I used to produce the interactive data visualizations for this research
project include hashtag (#) analysis and topic modeling using network graphs. Network graphs
connect a series of dots using lines. You can graph various entities such as relations among
people. I use this type of graph to conduct topic modeling, a method of producing analytics on
topics by keywords. I also did hashtag analysis that required some semantic analysis. When it
comes to analyzing images, I have experimented with creating different mosaics of profile
pictures. These image mosaics are a type of cultural analytics – an approach to data visualization
that situates visual imagery as a site of political control and capitalist consumerism. The most
recent one discussed in this paper is on the 2014 attack on Gaza, through the display of a mosaic
of images tweeted under five separate hashtags. Before discussing the Gaza mosaic, however, I
will first turn to an earlier mosaic, based on tweets made during the Egyptian revolution in 2011.
The Bare #Egypt Tweets in 2011
In his 2012 article, “The Arab revolutions; the emergence of a new political subjectivity,”
Sari Hanafi argues that the Arab youth feel that they have become a Homo sacer, in the sense of
Agamben. Hanafi meant that this was the revolt of “bare lives” –of defenseless hungry bodies
that the regime had stripped of political identity and of the right to belong to such groups as the
Islamic Renaissance Movement “al-Nahda”, the Tunisian Communist Labor Party, and the
Muslim brotherhood.
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In Homo Sacer, Agamben connects the problem of pure possibility,
potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the
latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Agamben probes with
great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in
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the history of traditional political theory.
State of Exception is the second book in his series. The
first, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, was published in English in 1998. The
third, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, was first published in English by
Zone Books in 1999 and reissued by them in paperback in 2002.
In a very insightful book review of State of Exception by the London Review of Books,
Malcolm Bull succinctly described Agamben’s vision of the state of exception. He wrote:
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben does not want his fingerprints taken and,
unlike like most European critics of the evil empire, he has been willing to forego an
academic visit to the United States in order to prevent it happening. What is at stake, he
explains, is the 'new bio-political relationship between citizens and the state'.
Fingerprinting makes 'the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity . . . the
body's biological life' part of the system of state control. And though it is hard to see how
fingerprints, as opposed to the monstrous Other in a passport photo, might constitute an
aspect of anyone's subjectivity, Agamben's unwillingness to share this information with
the American state is still a significant refusal.
For Agamben, fingerprinting is not just a matter of civil liberties: it is symptomatic of an
alarming shift in political geography. We have moved from Athens to Auschwitz: the
West's political model is now the concentration camp rather than the city state; we are no
longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by any
difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to
be incarcerated - or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft.
Seemingly designed for the current situation, Agamben's work is one of the few instances
of contraflow at a time when European opposition to American imperialism is sustained
chiefly through such US exports as Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Michael Moore. But
although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they
represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush
presidency. It is part of a wider change in governance in which the rule of law is routinely
displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to
extra-judicial state violence.
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Taking his cue from Agamben’s state of exception, Hanafi constructs a theory of self-
reflexive individuality in the context of the change of regime and revolution in the Arab world.
He argues: “Through this analysis the study explores the new political subjectivity ushered in by
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these revolutions, in the specific form of individuality, or what is termed here reflexive
individualism. This individualism, which is different from the neoliberal concept, is not a
straightforward one predicated on anti-patriarchal authority, anti-tribe, anti-community or anti-
political party sentiments. The political subjectivity of the individuals who have taken part is
formed and shaped both within and across the shadowy edges of political institutions and their
production of legitimacy and knowledge.”
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The political movements that took place in Egypt in 2011 involved millions of
individual participants. Cyberspace came to empower this reflexive individualism. Each
demonstrator became a “journalist” carrying a mobile phone and filming state repression,
thereby bypassing the official media. My attempt to capture this “reflexive individuality”
materialized in this highly abstract network visualization of over a half a million tweets of
#Egypt over the month of July 2011. It is a metonymic stand-in for the virtual body politic itself.
The network drawing shown in Figure 24 represents a sensory experience of the
immensity of online media—the network has become so complex, big, and alive. My intent is to
offer a new perspective on the microcosms within macrocosms of this world, somewhat
unfinished, and unknowable—to bring these complex representations of movements of
millions/billions of people with many leaders together in a way that allows any individual to
experience through the senses what nobody logically organizes in their human head.
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Figure 24. This is a network visualization, organized by language, of half-a-million tweets on
#Egypt in July 2011. English and Arabic make up the vast majority of the twitter traffic. The
breakdown is 59% Arabic (Green), 30% English (Blue), 2.25% Hindi (Gold), 1.6% French
(Red), 0.7% Urdu (Purple) and 0.6% Finnish. The remainder (Farsi, Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese) is less than 0.5%. By VJ Um Amel, 2011.
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In 2011, it was Bouazizi’s act of protest-suicide that created a pattern of resistance whose
effectiveness was achieved at the moment of the body’s self-immolation. The posters, theatrical
chants, music, comedy, and sarcasm that unfolded in Tunisia caused a domino effect in other
Arab countries, starting in Egypt. In this setting, the revolutionary youth are educated individuals
who came together in places like Tahrir Square and the Twittersphere in acts of solidarity
mediated in front of global witnesses. Mohamed Bouazizi, who died by committing suicide, and
other activists became actors who deliberately sacrificed themselves, and by that act, inverted the
relationship with the sovereign authority.
In 2014, the Palestinian resistance in Gaza also challenged the sovereign authority that
sought to turn them into humiliated subjects who could be killed without any recognition, i.e.
death without value. The devastating and disproportionate attack on Gaza produced a different
relationship between the Palestinian body politic and the occupying state.
#GazaUnderAttack
Gazans have been under siege in this manner since 2006 with cuts from water and power
supplies and direct military attack from the state of Israel. By 2014, there were hundreds of
thousands of children under the age of ten in Gaza who had lived through three wars in their
short lifetimes. I argue that the exhibition of young, dead Palestinian bodies on social media felt
not just obscene, but pornographic to remote virtual viewers. The excess of violence, the excess
of the images, was pornographic. As Robert Jensen put it,
Pornography is what the end of the world looks like. We are blinded by self-destructive
fantasy. An array of amusements and spectacles, including TV “reality” shows, huge
sporting events, social media, porn (which earns at least twice what Hollywood movies
generate), alluring luxury products, drugs, alcohol, and magical Jesus offer enticing exit
doors from reality.
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And thus, I created #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by
Hashtag as an interactive, audio-visual narrative using five sets of posts from Twitter on #Gaza
that were gathered and analysed by R-Shief. It includes an interactive mosaic of the surveillance
image that went viral of the boys killed on a beach in Gaza, along with computerized sound files
of the tweets and an organized gallery of the images most tweeted. The mosaic (Figure 25) is
comprised of more than a thousand images posted on Twitter within an hour on 26 July 2014.
Simply juxtaposing the imagery of the very real public sphere of Tahrir during the
revolution when the square was festooned with huge posters of images with the pornographic
violent images of broken young Palestinian bodies witnessed on mobile devices begs for further
inquiry. How does the Tahrir experience—in human scale with 20-feet high images—compare
with the smaller scale of the phone or computer?
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Figure 25. VJ Um Amel, #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by
Hashtag (August 2014, screenshot of interactive audio-visual mosaic).
The design process I used to make this piece combines a method of cultural analytics
with a world-building approach to narrative, displayed through a web interface. This media
praxis draws upon the works of Lev Manovich in cultural analytics. However, rather than using
formal elements like color or hue to determine the procedural form of the image, my process
involves pulling culturally significant content and prioritizing images that are most popular in
my representation of social media on Gaza by hashtag. This is determined through analyzing
trends on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other websites.
By clicking on the #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg interface (please do so),
the user is able to enter this world of images and audio tweets.
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The immersive experience is
meant to make you feel the bodies bloodied and maimed, bombed and broken, in photographs on
social media in the hundreds of thousands. On the homepage is an interactive mosaic with a mix
of images parsed from sets of tweets by five hashtags: #GazaUnderAttack (Figure 26), #Gaza,
#48KMarch, #PalestineResists, and #ProtectiveEdge (Figure 27). As you hover over the mosaic,
the images enlarge (see for example Figure 28). When you click on the hashtags on the menu at
the top, you get a traditional gallery display of the images tweeted with that hashtag only. This
function allows users to compare mobilizations of information patterns.
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The Hashtags
Figure 26. Screenshot of interface provides a gallery of images with the hashtag
#GazaUnderAttack. Analytics from R-Shief.org
By comparing various sets of hashtags, semantic differences emerge among different
online communities. In covering most events, there are often several hashtags circulating. One
will represent the name of the person, place, or event, such as #Egypt or #Gaza. And then there
are the more creative hashtags that represent a political position or movement in a particular
struggle; in this instance, #GazaUnderAttack (see Figure 26) represented the voice of the
majority of tweets on Gaza, even more than #Gaza tags. More than half of the people tweeting
on the subject saw the people in Gaza as victims. The fewest tweets came from the hashtag
#PalestineResists, used by activists, and #ProtectiveEdge (see Figure 27), which is the Israeli
name for the offensive against Gaza that summer.
According to literary critic, Katherine Hayles, “virtuality is to exist in such a way that it
is actualized by being differentiated…to create its lines of differentiation in order to be
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actualized” (Hayles, 1999: 27).
The virtual cannot become-actual without differentiating itself in
the process. In a way, the virtual will always miss the mark of actuality through this differential;
it must toggle undecidedly between presence and pattern, “materiality on the one hand,
information on the other,” as Hayles asserts. This raises the question: is the virtual even a useful
category of hermeneutics anymore? Or have our lives become so integrated with virtual and
digital worlds that even conceiving of the physical and the virtual as distinct becomes
empirically and/or phenomenologically misguided?
Figure 27. Screenshot of interface provides a gallery of images with the hashtag
#ProtectiveEdge. Analytics from R-Shief.org.
There are data files, programs that call and process the files, hardware functionalities that
interpret or compile the programs, and so on. It takes all of these to produce the electronic text.
Omit any one of them, and the text literally cannot be produced. For this reason, it would be
more accurate to call an electronic text a process rather than an object
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Even these other entities—files, programs, hardware functionalities that are “literally”
necessary for the production of the electronic text—seem to be working in the service of a
familiar “literary” textual persistence. Are the tweets here seen as a process or the authorized
result of a process? Finally, what about when text as “transitory image” can be mobilized through
such innovations as dynamic typography, and where words function both as verbal signifiers and
as visual images whose kinetic qualities also convey meaning? Are these dual-aspect “word-
images” functioning, for the critic or reader, in time? Whose real time? The author’s time? The
reader’s time? Are they processes or have they just acquired (new) qualities?
I do want to argue, in agreement with Hayles, that text is process, but in order to allow
code to comment on the writing machine, we need to elaborate a stronger statement of this
argument, one that is less fixated on a layered, flickering structure that imitates persistent text, or
on a text – persistent in this sense – that is able to “acquire” paratextual dynamics. Instead, we
need to recognize a textuality that is itself a dynamic because it contains, conceals, and runs on
code, because it exists only as a durational, transliteral process.
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Figure 28. The interactive visualization provides multiple ways to view the tweeted images: in
the mosaic, hovering over the mosaic, in a gallery by hashtag, and in this close-up view.
Analytics from R-Shief.org.
Hayles defines virtuality as a negotiation between materiality and information patterns
that are generated in the virtual world. Thus, virtuality itself is comprised of the words in the
ideas expressed on social media, not the people themselves. Looking at social media content
through a virtual lens requires a focus on a different kind of analytics – on information patterns
and flows. She demonstrates “how information lost its body” in order that we might better know
how to keep disembodiment from being written once again into dominant concepts of
subjectivity. She explains that electronic textuality involves multiple senses utilizing signifying
components that allow us to see images as elements of narrative.
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In conclusion, we can see that from Walter Benjamin and Lev Manovich to Instagram
and machine vision, new strategies of seeing and representation in modern and software societies
constantly emerge and reshape our field of phenomenological, affective, and discursive vision.
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Social media’s use of images and representations of the body, within the highly securitized and
militarized networks and landscapes that we traverse, focuses attention on the body as a site of
contested political control and capitalist consumerism.
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CHAPTER FIVE
The Politics of Knowledge Production and New Media
This doctoral project engages a set of methodologies that emerge at the intersection of
both cultural and technical analytics. In doing so, the first objective is to provide some historical
context for the growing interest in the analytic properties of social media content. As the research
and experience has shown, the stock of ‘primary data’ is important, but not determinant in
creating nuanced cultural analyses. This research considers the work of data visualizations,
especially in relationship to the stock of primary data (actual tweets, status posts, etc.). The
second objective is to argue for the importance of paying attention to the specific language of the
stock of primary ‘social media’ data. This research focuses specifically on the use of Arabic
online. It is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. Of course, there is the cultural moment of
the Arab uprisings. But most analyses of this so-called ‘social media’ revolution had not taken
into consideration the analysis of the meaning of actual Arabic language use. After harvesting
and analyzing Twitter posts for more than five years (2009 through 2015), it has become clear
that the use of Arabic language online is steadily rising. For example in one month alone (April
2012), more than eight per cent of the tweets that used the English-language hashtags #Tahrir
and #Jan 25 were written in Arabic. More than ninety-five per cent of tweets using related Arabic
hashtags were written in Arabic. This project goes far to identifying and addressing the gaps in
the visual and textual analysis of digital information on the Middle East and North Africa.
This media praxis methodology interrogates new modes of knowledge production as
reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, and heterogeneity in the age of “big data.” Through critique of
database narrative and the computerization of thinking and culture, I articulate techniques of
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information analysis as research method in the humanities. The challenge today is in producing
knowledge that is analytically rigorous, durable, and independent from various securitized and
militarized power centers and policy circles. What are the new forms of sociality and political
action enabled by global networks? How does one consider the multiplicities of networks:
solidarity networks, artistic networks, academic networks, virtual networks; networked images as
political instruments; and media of global political action since the Arab Spring; the new body
politic as a body without skin?
In conclusion, R-Shief is learning to embrace the problem of a revolutionary project—in
making this accessible to people, many very difficult questions need to be addressed. Who are
the people we are giving this to and how do we give it to them? R-Shief is one of the few places
outside of state-run and/or corporate-run institutions where historical and real-time social media
is made available. This leaves us with the challenge of political mobilization. How can R-Shief
inspire activists and teachers and students to use this colossal archive? A couple clear uses that
have emerged over time include developing teaching modules and detailed assignments. For
example, in collaboration with faculty at Towson University, R-Shief has supported history
students on an assignment to analyze tweets and their visual interpretation using R-Shief’s
Visualizer tool. Based on this research, students wrote 500-word essays based on findings related
to their research paper topic.
This is a project that lies at the intersection of all these disciplines as a site of digital
humanities. How do we perceive the digital humanities as a bridge/site for bringing together
different knowledges? The Digital Humanities functions as a process of bringing the disciplines
together in a nexus of friction points.
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Another friction point is between the real and virtual world. Breaking down this duality,
or point of friction, allows us to understand how the virtual and the real construct and reflect one
another. A key example is the way that both revolutionaries and state-forces have attempted to
use big data and its distribution for starkly different ends. Indeed, the Internet itself is a site of
contestation over information and knowledge production. The battle for net neutrality is one core
reflection of this contestation, even as the broader idea of the Internet as a public good erodes.
While it may be tempting to dismiss media such as Twitter as corporate structure, we
must also recognize how techies like Alaa Abd AlFattah developed software to destabilize the
corporate form to realize revolutionary content. The key here is to move beyond both the
vindication and indictment of the virtual world. Only in dismantling this disparity can we
effectively recognize the Internet's potential to both reify and challenge dominant economies of
knowledge production. Common myths about the digital environment are that it is stable, even
archival (i.e., permanent) and that it is “immaterial” (i.e., not instantiated in analogue reality).
Every actual engagement with digital technology demonstrates the opposite. It brings a
connectivity of a global world. It allows there are certain aspects, tones, without reading the
Arabic sources you miss out. It is also about understanding that there is still a higher of
production of knowledge, this time digital knowledge. And this work begins to right, and write,
that.
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ENDNOTES
1
M. Gladwell (2011) Does Egypt Need Twitter? The New Yorker, February 2, 2011. Available at
newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html, accessed October 6, 2013.
2
Accessed on October 7, 2014:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=social+media+arab+spring&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=
3
J. Ghannam (2012) Digital Media in the Arab World One Year After the Revolutions, March 28. A Report to the
Center for International Media Assistance, available online at: http://www.ned.org/cima/publications/digital-media-
arab-world-one-year-after-revolutions. p. 3
4
Ibid., p. 26.
5
G. Miller (2009) Social Scientists Wade Into the Tweet Stream, Science, September 30, 2011, p. 1815.
6
See further M. Castells (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (London:
Polity).
7
B. Wellman (2001) Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Networked Individualism, International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2), pp. 227–252.
8
M. Castells (2009) Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
9
M. Hardt & A. Negri (2011) Arabs are Democracy’s New Pioneers, The Guardian, February 24, 2011. Available
at www.guardian.co.uk/commentsfree/2011/feb/24/arabs-democracy-latin-america; accessed June 23, 2013; J.
Hands (2010) @ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture (London: Pluto Press); and
P. Mason (2012) Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso).
10
H. Jenkins (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University
Press).
11
A. Bruns (2010) From Reader to Writer: Citizen Journalism as News Produsage, in: J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup &
M. Allen (eds) Internet Research Handbook (Dordrecht, NL: Springer), pp. 119–134. \
12
M. Aouragh & A. Alexander (2011) The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution,
International Journal of Communication, 5, pp. 1344–1358.
13
Analysis presented to Collaborative Cultural Analytics research group by Miriyam Aouragh.
14
International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), http://www.icwsm.org.
15
B. Etling, J. Kelly, R. Faris & J. Palfrey (2009) Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics and Dissent Online,
New Media & Society, 12(8), pp. 1225–1243, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385096
16
On the use of data to support colonialism, see J.C. Scott (1999) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press).
17
T. Mitchell (1988) Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
18
Ibid., p. 12.
19
M. Gladwell (2011) Does Egypt Need Twitter? The New Yorker, February 2, 2011. Available at
newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html, accessed October 6, 2013.
87
20
M. Mateas (2007) Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner, ETC Press, May 4, 2007.
21
M. M. el-Nawawy & A. Iskandar (2003) Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and
Redefining Modern Journalism (New York: Basic Books); P. M. Seib (2008) The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New
Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics (New York: Potomac Books); M. Kraidy (2009) Reality Television and
Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); M. Kraidy & J.F. Khalil (2010)
Arab Television Industries (London: British Film Institute).
22
J. Anderson & D. Eickelman (2003) New Media and the Muslim World: The Emergent Public Sphere
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press); P.M. Seib (ed.) (2009) New Media and the Middle East (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan).
23
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (2012), Volume 5(1) (Leiden: Brill).
24
M. Lynch (2012) The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs),
pp. 10–11.
25
Ibid., pp. 104 – 124.
26
See, for example, P. Howard (2010) The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology
and Political Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Aouragh & Alexander (2011) The Egyptian Experience; M.
El-Ghobashy (2011) The Praxis of the Egyptian Revolution, Middle East Research and Information Project, no. 258.
Available at http://www.merip.org/mer/mer258/praxis-egyptian-revolution, accessed October 6, 2013; C. Hirschkind
(2011) Uprising in Egypt: The Road to Tahrir, in: The Immanent Frame: Blog of Social Science Research Council.
Available at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/ 02/09/the-road-to-tahrir/; and A. Iskandar & B. Haddad (2013) Meditating
the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing).
27
S. Gonzalez-Bailon, J. Borge-Holthoefer & Y. Moreno (2012) Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online
Protest Diffusion, American Behavioral Scientist. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract/2017808, accessed October 6,
2013.
28
Etling, Kelly, Faris & Palfrey, Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere (2010).
29
Howard, P. N. and Parks, M. R. (2012), Social Media and Political Change: Capacity, Constraint, and
Consequence. Journal of Communication, 62: 359–362. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01626.x
30
See Lever (2013) Debate Flares on ‘Twitter Revolutions,’ Arab Spring, AFP, March 10.
31
F. Salem & R. Mourtada (2013) Facebook Usage: Factors and Analysis (January, vol. 3, no. 1, http://www.
arabsocialmediareport.com/Facebook/LineChart.aspx); Civil Movements: The Impact of Facebook and Twitter
(May 2011, vol. 1, no. 2, www.dsg.ae/portals/0/ASMR2.pdf); and The Role of Social Media in Arab Women’s
Empowerment (November 2011, vol. 1, no. 3, www.arabsocialmediareport.com/UserManagement/
PDF/ASMAR%20Report%203.pdf); all in The Arab Social Media Report (Dubai, UAE: Dubai School of
Government) and all accessed June 23, 2013.
32
Salem & Mourtada (2011) Civil Movements. They explain their statistical methods as, ‘with a sample of about
10,000,000 tweets among 190,000 Twitter users, estimating the size of a Twitter population was a simple two-step
process: capture a number of samples (or «sweeps») of users from each country, and use a mark-recapture based
technique to compute a population estimate.’
33
M. Garber (2012) A Year after the Egyptian Revolution, 10% of Its Social Media Documentation is Already
Gone, The Atlantic, February 16, 2012. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/a-year-
after-the-egyptian-revolution-10-of-its-social-media-documentation-is-already-gone/253163/.
88
34
B. Youssef (2011) Internet and Political Mobilization in Egypt and Tunisia, Connected in Cairo, August 8, 2011.
Available at http://connectedincairo.com/2011/08/08/internet-and-political-mobilization-in-egypt-and-tunisia/,
accessed October 6, 2013.
35
Ibid., p. 4.
36
M. Choy, L.F.M. Cheong, N.L. Ma & P.S. Koo (2011) A Sentiment Analysis of Singapore Presidential Election
2011 using Twitter Data with Census Correction (eprint arXiv:1108.5520).
37
S. B. Elson, D. Yeung, P. Roshan, S.R. Bohandy & A. Nader (2011) Using Social Media to Gauge Iranian Public
Opinion and Mood After the 2009 Election (Santa Monica: The RAND Corporation).
38
Ibid., p. 26.
39
In September 2011, TwapperKeeper was bought by HooteSuite, which left the Twitter market for archived tweets
in great demand again.
40
This research was conducted prior to the violence of June 2013.
41
For example, M. Lynch (2012) The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East (New York:
Public Affairs).
42
The annual Arab Public Opinion Poll conducted by Zogby International and Brookings Institute (2003–11).
43
For example, J. Anderson & D. Eickelman (2003) New Media and the Muslim World: The Emergent Public
Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
44
Today, about 35% of all Egyptians are Internet users.
45
A content management system (CMS) is an application that allows publishing, editing and modifying content,
organizing, deleting as well as maintenance from a central interface. These systems also help manage workflow in a
collaborative environment. You might be more familiar with other CMSs like WordPress or Jumla.
46
Accessed October 7, 2014: https://localize.drupal.org/translate/languages/ar
47
Alaa’s profile accessed October 7, 2014: https://www.drupal.org/user/8991
48
Accessed October 7, 2014: http://tortureinegypt.net/
49
J. Sinclair (ed.) (1987) Look Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing (London: Collins
ELT) and G. Dunbar (ed.) (1989) Computers and Translation, 3 (3/4), pp. 263–266.
50
J.M. Sinclair (1991) Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
51
Gonzalez-Bailon, Borge-Holthoefer & Moreno, Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials.
52
Technology studied outside of the sciences must also face a fear among many academicians. As Franklin and
Rodriguez introduce their argument, “Hypertext. Hypermedia. High Performance Computing." It's enough to make a
humanities scholar hyperventilate. A debate has raged in the last decade (at least) about whether or not the Digital
Age will see the death of The Book, The Library and perhaps, The Humanities more broadly.” Franklin and
Rodriguez.
53
In Hudson, Leila, Iskandar, Adel, and Kirk, Mimi (Eds., 2014) Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan), pp. 49-74.
89
54
In an email to the Arab Techies listserv by Alaa Abd El Fatah, Co-Founder of the Arab Techies, blogger, activist,
Drupal programmer.
55
Assistant Secretary Rosemary Gottemoeller, ‘From the Manhattan Project to the Cloud: Arms Control in the
Information Age’ (Sidney Drell Lecture at Stanford University, Stanford, CA 27 October 2011),
http://www.state.gov/t/avc/rls/176331.htm/ (accessed 15 September 2014).
56
Anne Balsamo, (2011) "Gendering the Technological Imagination" Designing Culture (Durham: Duke University
Press), 31.
57
Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller mentioned this in her address, “From the Manhattan Project to the
Cloud: Arms Control in the Information Age” to Stanford in October 2011.
58
See: R-Shief, http://kal3a.r-shief.org/search/ (accessed 16 September 2014).
59
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 33.
60
Mateas, Procedural Literacy. Page????
61
Franklin, Kevin D. and Karen Rodriguez, “The Next Big Thing in Humanities,
Arts, and Social Science Computing: Cultural Analytics,” HPC Wire, July 29, 2008.
62
Ibid.
63
Manovich, Lev. “Data stream, database, timeline (part 1).” October 27, 2012.
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2012/10/data-stream-database-timeline-new.html
64
Ralske, Kurt. “What is Cultural Analytics?” July 2010.
65
UNICEF, http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/egypt_statistics.html (24 December 2013) (accessed on 17
September 2013). According to UNICEF’s statistics by country, the total adult literacy rate in Egypt between 2005 –
2010 is 66 per cent.
66
According to Social Bakers, among internet users in Egypt, the total number of Facebook users is reaching 10.7
million, which translates into a Facebook penetration rate of 13.26 per cent.
67
Laura U. Marks. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010). Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
68
See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drumzo/7144575985/in/photostream/ (accessed on 16 September 2014).
69
Reference to excerpt from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then, I
contradict myself./ I am large. I contain multitudes.”
70
“A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but
there is immediate publicity everywhere” (Kierkegaard, 1962).
71
W. Benjamin (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Penguin Books, p.3.
72
M. LeVine (2012) “Music and the Aura of Revolution”, International Journal of Middle East Studies. Vol. 44,
04, pp. 794-797.
90
73
C. Anderson (2008) ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete’, Wired, June
23.
74
S. Hanafi (2012) ‘The Arab revolutions; the emergence of a new political subjectivity’, Contemporary Arab
Affairs, 5:2, 198-213.
75
Malcolm Bull, “States don't really mind their citizens dying (provided they don't all do it at once): they just don't
like anyone else to kill them,” London Review of Books, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben2.htm
(accessed March 1, 2015).
76
Hanafi, 201.
77
As quoted in Chris Hedges, (2015) "Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like,” OpEdNews,
February 15.
78
VJ Um Amel, http://vjumamel.com/portfolio/gaza-audio-visual-narrative-by-a-cyborg-images-tweeted-by-
hashtag/ (accessed 15 September 2014).
79
K. Hayles (2003) ‘Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality’, Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 6, no.
3, 269.
91
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. This graph resulted from a collaborative study of nearly 25 million tweets from twelve
hashtag feeds. It is a longitudinal study over one year comparing twelve hashtag streams. Created
by VJ Um Amel, 2012.
Figure 2. This is a graph representing daily percentages of Arabic versus English in tweets from
six hashtag feeds on Egypt and one on Gaza. Created by VJ Um Amel, 2012.
Figure 3. Network graph of Arab blogosphere published in Mapping the Arab Blogosphere
article by Etling et al. the Harvard Berkman Center (2009).
Figure 4. Semantic Analysis of #Jan25 uses tweets archived with the hashtag #Jan25 during the
eighteen days of protests against the Mubarak regime.
Figure 5. This graph series represent sentiment analysis conducted in Arabic using IBM tools.
For complete description and interactive tool, see Arabic sentiment analysis on vjumamel.com.
Figure 6. This sentiment analysis was conducted on English tweets posted in June 2011 with the
hashtag #Jan25. The size of the bubbles represents the volume of tweets.
Figure 7. This is a screenshot of the R-Shief 2.0 homepage from June 2011.
Figure 8. This is a word cloud of the top tweets used in the prediction of the fall of Tripoli on
August 22, 2011. For complete description and interactive tool, see blog post on r-shief.org.
Figure 9. This is a 3D visualization of R-Shief’s Twitterminer tool, active from 2010 through
2013. It shows the top twenty hashtags collected over a 48-hour period. Each column represents
an hour.
Figure 10. This is a screenshot of R-Shief’s Hashtag Trends Widget. This widget measures
trending words in real time and can be embedded anywhere as an iframe.
92
Figure 11. This is a screenshot of R-Shief’s Historical Hashtag (#) Visualizer. It allows you to
see the top words used over any date range. It also provides frequency counts of retweets, users,
and other hashtags.
Figure 12. This is from a study conducted using R-Shief data analytics from more than six
million Facebook users online from 2011 through 2012.
Figure 13. Flyer of Music, Freedom, and a Bit of Egyptian Cinema live VJ/DJ performance
hosted by Makkan Art Gallery sponsored by National Gallery of Art in Amman, Jordan.
Figure 14. This video remix, Women and Youth in Revolutions, features spoken word
performance by Suheir Hammad and composed music by DJ Luckxe. It was recorded live on
February 5, 2011 and has garnered over ten thousand hits.
Figure 15. Flyer for performance in Cairo, Egypt: see video and photo documentation.
Figure 16. Venue for performance in Cairo, Egypt: see video and photo documentation.
Figure 17. From Gaza to Cairo is a live cinema performance at the Collective Alchemy: Turning
Grief into Action at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics GSI Convergence in
2013.
Figure 18. VJ Um Amel, Rosetta Stones from Cyberspace (2011), are a series of network
visualization of tweets on #Egypt and #Syria during July 2011.
Figure 19. VJ Um Amel, Riot Smoke (2012). See documentation.
Figure 20. VJ Um Amel, Walk Like An Egyptian (2012).
Figure 21. What the World Tweeted on #Egypt is a running java applet of all the tweets on
#Egypt that were posted to Twitter the day Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt.
93
Figure 22. Tweetworld is an interactive game in 3D. See video documentation.
Figure 23. This is the third most tweeted image in stream of tweets in #Ferguson on the night of
the no indictment charge of Darren Wilson. Image ranking analytics by Kal3a.
Figure 24. This is a network visualization organized by language of half-a-million tweets on
#Egypt in July 2011. English and Arabic make up the vast majority of the twitter traffic. The
breakdown is 59% Arabic (Green), 30% English (Blue), 2.25% Hindi (Gold), 1.6% French
(Red), 0.7% Urdu (Purple) and 0.6% Finnish. The remainder (Farsi, Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese) is less than 0.5%. By VJ Um Amel, 2011.
Figure 25. VJ Um Amel, #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by
Hashtag (August 2014, screenshot of interactive audio-visual mosaic).
Figure 26. Screenshot of interface provides a gallery of images with the hashtag
#GazaUnderAttack. Analytics from R-Shief.org
Figure 27. Screenshot of interface provides a gallery of images with the hashtag
#ProtectiveEdge. Analytics from R-Shief.org.
Figure 28. The interactive visualization provides multiple ways to view the tweeted images: in
the mosaic, hovering over the mosaic, in a gallery by hashtag, and in this close-up view.
Analytics from R-Shief.org.
94
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Sakr, Laila Shereen
(author)
Core Title
From archive to analytics: the R-Shief media system and the stories it tells
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)
Publication Date
04/20/2015
Defense Date
10/21/2014
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Analytics,big data,cinematic arts,creative coding,cultural analytics,digital activism,Egypt,media arts,media system,Middle East,OAI-PMH Harvest,social media,virtual body politic,VJ'ing
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Anderson, Steven F. (
committee chair
), Balsamo, Anne (
committee chair
), Brand, Laurie (
committee member
), Patterson, Michael (
committee member
), Seikaly, Sherene (
committee member
)
Creator Email
laila@vjumamel.com,sakr@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-554759
Unique identifier
UC11297633
Identifier
etd-SakrLailaS-3276.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-554759 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-SakrLailaS-3276.pdf
Dmrecord
554759
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Sakr, Laila Shereen
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
Analytics
big data
cinematic arts
creative coding
cultural analytics
digital activism
media arts
media system
social media
virtual body politic
VJ'ing