R-Shief

Lina Attalah, almasryalyoum.com, VJ Um Amel hits ‘the social’ in media "R-Shief, which is the Arabic word for archive, is a digital lab based in Los Angeles that produces real-time analysis of online social media content in the Arab world, most notably on the revolutions. It aggregates the web, Facebook, Twitter and blogs into a database archive, then provides different statistical analyses of all the data, posts with the most visits, etc. It also has been data mining Twitter by hashtag every two minutes since August 2010. R-Shief’s Twittermine tool allows users to access the data through multiple search criteria."

I have mentioned this in previous posts. Check out R-Shief, in particular Twitterminer.

Also see Liz Losh, dmlcentral.net, Digital Learning and the Arab Spring "Shereen Sakr claims that too much of how conventional information literacy is constituted overvalues “the idea of finding the source,” one that is authoritative, credible in all cases, and definitive as a point of origin. Says Shereen Sakr, “political speech online is not an epidemic; there is no methodology of Patient Zero; there are many sources speaking in simultaneity. They are echoing and keep changing each time they echo.” “If you have tools, that’s where analytics with digital technology is really helpful. Technology has created scales beyond human computability; we only have human filters.”"

I'd be interested in hearing from any prospective PhD candidate, wanting to do research in this area in relation to the study of Islam and Muslims in contemporary contexts.