It's easy to get lost in the massive amounts of tweets that chronicled the Egyptian revolution, let alone the chaos of following subjects in real-time. The website r-shief.org allows researchers, journalists, and the average news junkie to take a step back from the trees and look at the forest. R-shief, which takes its name from the Arabic word for archive, is a self-described “hub” for research and analysis on how the Internet treats news coming out of the Arab-world. Laila Shereen Sakr, a media artist and critic, conceived of the idea. Her background in art are clear from a look at the maps and graphs that visitors can use to get a macro-view of the tweets, news stories, and comments regarding breaking events in the Middle East and North Africa. On the website, visitors can also search multiple mediums, including Twitter, Facebook, books, technical pieces of writing, and audio samples. They can then couple their search to a specific country. There is a special emphasis throughout regarding Arabic vs non-Arabic language tweets and articles, and the difference in coverage that is often lost by monoglots. One such graph shows how Arabic tweets compare in volume to English tweets on Gaza. R-Shief is a project to watch in the coming weeks as social media increases in importance and relevancy. It may also prove to be a model for social analysis beyond the events rocking North Africa. BM
