This paper will be jointly presented by the creator of a digital archive and an instructor using the archive in a classroom. The digital archive is a knowledge management system that houses a unique and rich collection of multilingual social media content from the 2011 Arab uprisings to the present. It is a ‘big data’ repository in terms of volume, velocity, and variety of data. Accessing social media to gain meaningful insight poses challenges. The archive addresses the limitations to processing this large scale of varied social media content, by providing search tools: indices of Facebook, Twitter, and website content stored, data visualizers, and teaching modules (under development) to support qualitative research based on ethnographic, social, and historical inquiry. By providing a rich archive of data from across the Internet, a suite of tools to help map and understand this data, and a platform for collaborative research practice, the archive helps academics, artists, and technologists alike to understand engagement in global social movements. As part of the research and development of substantive teaching modules on Arab Social Media, The Middle East Online, and Data Visualization, the archive has been working closely with instructors to bring these collections of social media into relevant classes. In teaching a Freshman Seminar in Spring 2014, the Instructor is focusing on the Arab Uprisings set in historical context hoping to captivate students’ interest in a topic that has deep historical roots, appears on the nightly news, and is plastered across social media. Students must research a major paper using traditional and non-traditional sources. One of the preparatory assignments requires them to use the digital archive’s Twitterminer tool, which aggregates tweets over a particular period of time on a particular topic of the students’ choosing. Students must then make some sense of the content in the tweets over the time period they chose and try to see some changes in the data over time. The Instructor will share the students’ experiences using the digital archive’s Twitterminer and their ability to interpret social media content and transform it into narrative prose. She expects there will be challenges to their success with this digital archive, ranging from their ability to navigate the site, to their ability to interpret tweets as a primary source, to their ability to category shift from social media to academic narrative. She will offer comparisons with their work based on traditional written sources.