Abstract

Short Paper

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Arab Spring, Social Network Service, Twitter, Facebook, Data Visualization.

Future Tripping VR project offers new design approaches to data visualization while expanding our understanding of how the logic of digital computation influenced and shaped twenty-first century global social movements. The project’s objective is to contribute to the increasing demand for understanding contemporary political speech, rapid social change, and data science drawing on social media and using the Middle East as a case study. Through critique of database narrative and shifting media practices during political, economic, and environmental shifts of the twenty-first century, this project articulates techniques of data analysis as a  research method in media studies and the digital humanities. The central questions are “How can we create a virtual and augmented realities installation and software application that is cinematic using real-time social media?”; “How might an embodied approach to understanding the patterns of data humanize the scholarship?” Using a practice-based design methodology, our research cluster proposes to build a 360 degree, first-person immersive, augmented reality (AR/VR) production of the Arab uprisings of 2011 using a substantial archive of social media from the current version of R-Shief.

• Intae Hwang is a researcher and product designer. He holds MFA in sculpture, MFA in Art and Technology, and PhD candidate in Media Arts and Technology Graduate program at UCSB (University of Californië – Santa Barbara, USA).
• Laila Shereen Sakr, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UCSB (University of Californië – Santa Barbara, USA). She created R-Shief to archive and visualize social media content of Arab countries.

Full text p. 354 – 356