A Digital Humanities Approach: Text, the Internet, and the Egyptian Uprising

Abstract

Can Twitter really bring a dictator to his knees? Does YouTube stream information that is more influential than traditional news providers such as the New York Times? In the mainstream media debate between Clay Shirky and Malcolm Gladwell about whether “the revolution will be tweeted,” both pundits make confidently totalizing arguments (see Malcolm Gladwell (2010) Small Change: Why the Revolutions Will Not Be Tweeted, The New Yorker (October 4), available online at: newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell; and Clay Shirky (2011) The Political Power of Social Media, Foreign Affairs (Jan./Feb.). In contrast, this article presents a micro-study of the hashtag (#) Tahrir using an emergent method of cultural analytics and a repository developed by a digital Arabic knowledge management 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 made manifest through large-scale street actions and the adoption of newly distributed communication practices around information technologies, but researchers can examine how verbal acts of protest can be conceptualized, facilitated, staged, ignored, negated, or thwarted in a culture of accelerated mediation and 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.

Keywords::

• Arabic
• big data
• digital
• Egyptian uprising
• knowledge production
• influence
• semantic
• linguistic
• Middle East studies

Notes

¹ VJ Um Amel is the online name for Laila Shereen Sakr. Her works are published under both names.

² The Collaborative Cultural Analytics (CCA) project involves a cross-disciplinary partnership among scholars at four main institutions: Prof. Nitin Sawhney and Prof. Peter Asaro at The New School are leading the project in the United States in collaboration with Laila Shereen Sakr, director of R-Shief, Inc. and a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California (USC); in the UK, Dr Christopher Brewster from the Aston Crisis Centre, Aston University is partnering with Dr Tarik Sabry at the University of Westminster.

³ See, for example, P. Marfleet & R. Al-Mahdi (2009) Egypt: The Moment of Change (London: Zed Books).

⁴ For example, M. Lynch (2012) The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs).

⁵ The annual Arab Public Opinion Poll conducted by Zogby International and Brookings Institute (2003–11).

⁶ For example, J. Anderson & D. Eickelman (2003) New Media and the Muslim World: The Emergent Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

⁷ See further M. Castells (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (London: Polity).

⁸ 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.

⁹ M. Castells (2009) Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

¹⁰ 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).

¹¹ H. Jenkins (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press).

¹² 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.

¹³ M. Aouragh & A. Alexander (2011) The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution, International Journal of Communication, 5, pp. 1344–1358.

¹⁴ Analysis presented to Collaborative Cultural Analytics research group by Miriyam Aouragh.

¹⁵ International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), http://www.icwsm.org.

¹⁶ B. Etling, J. Kelly, R. Faris & J. Palfrey (2010) Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics and Dissent Online, New Media & Society, 12(8), pp. 1225–1243, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385096

¹⁷ 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).

¹⁸ T. Mitchell (1988) Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 12.

²⁰ M. Gladwell (2011) Does Egypt Need Twitter?, The New Yorker, February 2, 2011. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html, accessed October 6, 2013.

²¹ See further M. Mateas (2007) Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner, ETC Press, May 4, 2007.

²² 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).

²³ 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).

²⁴Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (2012), Volume 5(1) (Leiden: Brill).

²⁵ M. Lynch (2012) The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs), pp. 10–11.

²⁶ Ibid., pp. 104–124.

²⁷ 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).

²⁸ 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.

²⁹ Etling, Kelly, Faris & Palfrey, Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere.

³⁰ This author attended the conference as director of R-Shief.

³¹ See R. Lever (2013) Debate Flares on ‘Twitter Revolutions’ Arab Spring, AFP, March 10.

³² 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.

³³ 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.’

³⁴ M. Garber (2011) A Year After the Egyptian Revolution, 10% of Its Social Media is Already Gone, The Atlantic, February 16, 2011. 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/

³⁵ 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.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 4.

³⁷ 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://cima.ned.org/publications/digital-media-arab-world-one-year-after-revolutions.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 3.

³⁹ 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).

⁴⁰ 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).

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 26.

⁴² In September 2011, TwapperKeeper was bought by HooteSuite, which left the Twitter market for archived tweets in great demand again.

⁴³ 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.

⁴⁴ J. M. Sinclair (1991) Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

⁴⁵ Gonzalez-Bailon, Borge-Holthoefer & Moreno, Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials.

⁴⁶ This research was conducted prior to the violence of June 2013.

⁴⁷ For example in one month alone (April 2012), more than 80 percent of the tweets that used the English-language hashtags #Tahrir and #Jan 25 were written in Arabic. More than 95 percent of tweets using related Arabic hashtags were written in Arabic.

⁴⁸ Mateas, Procedural Literacy.