r-shief.org / about /



ABOUT

R-Shief <the online journal> showcases and archives digital video of documentary film, radio, and live
cultural programming. Real-time, automated transcriptions alongside editorially selected hypertexts in
Arabic and English will feature current developments in the fields of web culture, media and the arts, civil
society and participation among people in contemporary Arab Diaspora. Working in information
visualization, I will design a graphical user interface to organize the site's Arabic /English content with added
semantic annotations.

The platform implements free extensions of the wiki-system powering Wikipedia, and extends them by
incorporating a semantic media wiki in Arabic authored by Mahmoud Zouari (April 2008). Using the wiki
publishing model, a form of processual publishing, the journal allows users to publish updates and
corrections to the automated transcriptions. It makes public the process of publishing itself. 

R-Shief is designed for a public moving between the Arab world and the West, a transnational Arab public
networked on Skype, listservs of organizations, social networking sites, as well as through shared, historical
experiences. R-Shief will provide its community with a hybrid platform to publish, visualize, and semantically
organize both digitally sophisticated work and written articles.

It offers its users a fresh perspective on the scene of contemporary Arab Diaspora, recognizing web culture
as significant in the life of twenty-first century migrants.  It is a place where the migrating English-speaking
Arab voice meets a video clip from the Gaza Strip, both on the same screen in two languages, in
multimedia.

R-Shief will launch in 2009.


INSTALLATIONS & PUBLIC STUFF

  2009 White paper accepted for publication at Parson's Journal for Information Mapping (PJIM)

11.22-11.25.08 Installation
of prototype for R-Chief at
the Middle East Studies
Association Conference

  11.08.08 - 02.09 Design interface
and make video for Warren Sack's
work, Conversation Map, an exhibit
in "The Art of Participation: 1950 to
Now" show at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art

  05.15.08 DANM Open Studios at the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice conference at UCSC

  04.12.08 On Performing Arab New
Media" at the Diasporic Bodies and
Visual Culture: Contemporary
African and African Diaspora Art
Perspectives conference at Cornell
University

  01-02.08 Graffiti and video
installation for Post Colonial Ninja
Front Exhibit at UCSC's Porter
Faculty Gallery
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"some rights reserved"--> creative commons licensing --> a laila shereen project --> 2008 --> inner file software