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COMPUTATIONAL DRAWING SAMPLES Laila Shereen Sakr /

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Laila Shereen Sakris VJ Um Amelonline. She is a PhD candidate in MediaArts + Practice at the University o Southern Caliornias School o CinematicArts and ounder o the digital lab, R-Shie, Inc. With a background in webdesign, her current practices include data visualization, live cinema, and compu-tational arts. Her doctoral work archives and maps the recent Arab uprisings andOccupy movements through semantic analysis o social media eeds in Arabic,Persian, French, English, Spanish, German. As a VJ, she uses digital arts andperormance to demonstrate how embodied habits o communication are ex-

pressed virtually, and to understand how communities use technology to designtheir own narratives and worlds. She has exhibited at the San Francisco MoMA,National Gallery o Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, DCFridge Art Gallery, among other venues. Her work has also been published in

Middle East Critique, Parsons Journal for Information Mapping, ToughtMesh,Jadaliyya, and in an edited volume onMediating the Arab Uprisings. She holdsan M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media rom University o Caliornia, SantaCruz and an M.A. in Arab Studies rom Georgetown University. Recent reviewsappear in Te Wall Street Journal, Science,Art erritories, Fast Company, Digital

Media and Learning, Egypt Independent, and Te Creators Project.

For more inormation, visit vjumamel.com.

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Image List

#Syria

All languages.............. ................ ................ ............... ................ ......4

Arabic, English, French.............. ............... ................ ............... ..5

Weekly comparison................. ................ ............... ................ .....6

#Egypt

All Languages................. ............... ................ ............... ................ ...7

Arabic, English, French................ ............... ................ ............... .8

Topic Analysis on Egypt.............. ................ ............... ...............9

Topic Analysis: Bassem Sabry................ ............... .............10

Topic Analysis: Carlos Latuff............... ................ ................11

Tis is a selected portolio o Computational Drawings: Te Secret World o Social Media in 2011. Tey are part o a series o procedurallydrawn images representing the immense and unwieldy social media activity rom 2011 to 2012. Tey draw upon one o the most rare and compre-hensive archives o social media content rom the Arab revolutionsR-Shie.org, an archive I began in 2008. Tis growing repository o Internet dataurgently seeks to critique historical inormation on the contemporary Arab worldinormation currently under siege, in real time and place. Muchlike a sculptor with clay or a painter with paint, the substance which I craf with is media.

Designed using analyses o tweets on #Syria and #Egypt, these drawings represent a month o activity (July-September 2011) on witter inabout hal a million tweets each. It clear to me that the etishization o data predominates to the detriment o the substance o what was being commu-nicated. Tese drawings demonstrate yet another layer o encoding and decoding o the data. Rather than etishizing over the technology, or the data,or the Arab Spring, I choose to represent this secret world o code in an abstract, algorithmic aesthetic, blow them up and situate them in and out otime. Tese images are not literal representations o this body o text; they are a stand in, a metonym or it. Tus, the aesthetics o the work also trace

back to choices made while creating the archiveunderstanding not only the text within the archive, but the archive as text itsel is significant.

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#Syria 59% Arabic (Green), 30% English (Blue), 2.25% Indian (Gold), 1.6% French (Red), 0.7% Urdu (Purple)and 0.6% Finnish. Everything else (Farsi, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) is less than .5%

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#Syria 59% Arabic (Green), 30% English (Blue), 2.25%

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#Syria comparing change over four weeks

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Week of 08-12-2011

Week of 08-26-2011

Week of 08-19-2011

Week of 09-02-2011

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#Egypt Arabic-only users in Green, English-only users in Blue, Arabic-English users in Purple

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#Egypt

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#Egypt

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#Egypt: Topic Analysis (Bassem Sabry) in English

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#Egypt: Topic Analysis (Carlos Latuff) in Arabic

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