In 2008, Laila Shereen Sakr created the digital archive, R-Shief, to collect, analyze, and visualize social media content. R-Shief would become a repository of multiple social movements from Occupy Wall Street to the 2011 Arab Uprisings. In its first years, R-Shief rapidly grew into a complex media system enabling Sakr to collect and analyze data from social networking sites and to innovate machine learning software. Using its immense data repository, Sakr developed one of the earliest detection algorithms that recognized language based on the series of characters in a tweet. R-Shief is a rich resource for social media analytics, digital activism, publications, art exhibitions, performances, visual art, and film production. According to Google Scholar, R-Shief has been cited in over one hundred and fifty publications.

Today, R-Shief is a publishing platform for social media driven data stories.