A proposed sitemap for the new site and the order to build it in — now that r-shief.org's active work has moved to Contrapuntal and this site's job is to hold the history.
The current nav mixes a changelog, three case studies, and a game project as five equal-weight items. Grouping them tells visitors what kind of page they're about to open before they click.
Fix what's visibly broken first, then re-tune the tone of what already exists, then fill the two real gaps, and build the dashboard last — once the site around it correctly frames what it is.
Low effort, high visibility — these are the things that make the site look unfinished to anyone who clicks around.
Not being built out. The nav item currently points to a page whose slug is still copy-of-freealaa — a leftover duplicate that serves the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi content instead of its own.
The URL is /mahsa-amini, which undercuts the page's own argument for using Jina's Kurdish name over the name imposed by state media.
/jin-jiyan-azadi. Wix will offer to set up a redirect from the old URL automatically — accept it so old links don't break.The links out to v1.r-shief.org through v4.r-shief.org are plain http://, which will trigger "not secure" browser warnings you don't control.
Copy edits, not rebuilds — the content underneath is good, it just needs to stop sounding like a live campaign.
Nothing currently tells a visitor that R-Shief's active work has moved. Add one line near the top or in the footer: "R-Shief is now an archive documenting the original project. For ongoing work, see Contrapuntal."
Rewrite the hunger-strike day-count and petition language into dated, past-tense framing — "In 2022, as COP27 opened, Alaa Abd El-Fattah was on day 221 of a hunger strike" rather than present-tense urgency. Keep the dataset downloads; relabel the petition links "Petitions active at the time" instead of live calls to action.
Mostly fine as-is. Relabel the outbound award and Access Now links as "Related" rather than blending them in as active CTAs.
Two pages the current site has no version of at all.
One authoritative page telling the founding story end to end — 2008/09 through 2017, then the 2026 handoff to Contrapuntal. This is also the right home for two stories that don't appear on the site yet at all: the January 27, 2011 server crash during the Egyptian uprising, and the Mortada Mansour sentiment-analysis misfire, where the system read local sarcasm as sincerity. Both are exactly the kind of "productive glitch" your own scholarly framing already argues for.
The homepage already advertises "110+ citations" as a credibility marker. Give scholars somewhere to act on that: a suggested citation format, links to Arabic Glitch and the Jadaliyya pieces, and a short list of work that has used R-Shief data, if you have one handy.
The flagship piece, and the reason to do it last: it should be framed by a site that already knows it's an archive, not a live tool promising something it can no longer deliver. Live Twitter/X hashtag harvesting the way the 2009–2017 versions worked isn't realistically revivable — API access changed too much. The stronger version is a reliable, browsable front end onto the 12.4M+ tweets already archived.
A search interface across the existing archive — the one thing every version of the dashboard had in common.
Promote what's already been built one-off per page — Crystallized Exposure, the #MahsaAmini network graph — into first-class, reusable dashboard views.
Right now only FreeAlaa has a download block. Centralize dataset access in the dashboard instead of repeating it per page.
A visible layer noting known analytical failures — tying directly back to the Mortada Mansour story on the new History page — instead of quietly smoothing them over.
data.r-shief.org sits outside Wix entirely. Before building, decide deliberately between three paths: keep it separate and just verify/re-skin it; embed it into the Wix site via iframe; or rebuild it natively inside Wix using Velo (Wix's custom-code layer) for full control. Each is a real trade-off in effort and control — worth choosing on purpose rather than defaulting to whichever is fastest this week.
Not placeholders — full drafts, in the register the rest of the site should move toward: dated, specific, unafraid of what went wrong.
R-Shief is now an archive. It documents the platform, the data, and the decade of work that built it — 2008 to 2017. For the work that continues from it, see Contrapuntal →
R-Shief began in 2009 as a thesis project — a bilingual test bed for mining and visualizing social media data, built by Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel) for an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz. Within two years it was a live instrument: by June 2011, R-Shief V1 was harvesting Twitter by hashtag and visualizing the results in real time, in the middle of the Arab uprisings it would go on to document for the next decade.
It broke, more than once, and the breaking is part of the record. On January 27, 2011, as tweet volume from the Egyptian uprising spiked, the shared server R-Shief ran on crashed under the load — the first of several migrations, first to a VPN server, later to the cloud, that taught as much about the physical cost of data infrastructure as any dashboard could show. Later that year, its Arabic sentiment analysis read a public statement by the Egyptian politician Mortada Mansour as sincere, missing that it was, to most of Egypt, a standing joke. The tool had learned to read the words. It had not learned to read the room.
By 2017, R-Shief V4 — running on a cloud stack we called kal3a — had grown into an archive of more than thirty billion tweets in over seventy languages, cited in more than 110 published works of scholarship. In 2026, its active work continues as Contrapuntal. This site is what's left standing: the archive itself, the tools that built it, and the record of what it got right and wrong along the way.
...on day 221 of a hunger strike and had begun refusing water.
In November 2022, as world leaders arrived in Egypt for COP27, Alaa Abd El-Fattah — the Egyptian-British programmer, writer, and activist who helped build the Arabic-language versions of the open web — was on day 221 of a hunger strike, and had begun refusing water. This page preserves what R-Shief archived that November: 180,451 #FreeAlaa tweets and 1.1 million+ #COP27 tweets, collected as the world was watching.
Suggested citation (APA): Sakr, L. S. (2009–2017). R-Shief: A digital archive and analysis platform for global social media data [Data set]. r-shief.org.
@misc{rshief,
author = {Sakr, Laila Shereen},
title = {R-Shief: A Digital Archive and Analysis Platform},
year = {2009--2017},
url = {https://r-shief.org}
}
In 2011, this system read a public statement by the Egyptian politician Mortada Mansour as sincere. To most of Egypt, it was a standing joke. Sentiment analysis reads words. On its own, it does not read a room, a history, or a wink — and this archive doesn't pretend otherwise.