This critical theory/production presentation will investigate revolutionary and innovative software developments and open source movement in Arabic. Since 2004 there has been a growing number of posts in Arabic by bloggers in the Arab world using the space as a site of information distribution and organizing, and the emergence of social media personas throughout the Arabic speaking world. In Gaza, activists like @Gazamom rose into the public eye through her tweets on the 2008 war. At the same time there were prestigious academic institutions already beginning to analyze this blogosphere. In 2009, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Information and Society published this groundbreaking, article: “Mapping the Arab Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent” where they published attractive data visualizations, however, nowhere in the article do they reference the blogs themselves. Unfortunately, these two trends—one organized by activists and one by academics—seemed to run parallel to each other rather than converging. By providing analysis through archival and media analytics, this presentation works to fill this critical gap between academics and activists. This paper will examine the various institutional contexts for “knowledge production” within the field of Arab media studies and methods for producing arguments in both written and visual/aural texts.The production and consumption of digital and social media reveal and challenge the boundaries and frictions between art, technology, and scholarship. Addressing both the potential and limitations of these archival and media practices provides a unique opportunity to reflect on mutlidisciplinarity and the digital humanities for critical and creative research and production, to engender interchange between approaches and modes, and to set standards for critical and creative engagement and production.