Based on 200 interviews to Egyptians from villages in the Nile Delta to the Sinai peninsula, a ground-breaking ‘dictionary of the revolution’ is taking shape. The project is led by Amira Hanafi, who runs a crowdfunding campaign to build a digital text and sound archive of those terms that marked the uprising recorded by history as the Arab Spring.
“In 2014, my team and I interviewed nearly 200 people across Egypt using handmade boxes of vocabulary cards. We worked with a lexicon of 40 words in each of 4 categories: a total of 160 terms related to the revolution. We recorded hundreds of hours of interviews,” she says.
The dictionary aims to keep a fundamental memory alive: the processes the country –and the colective conscience– underwent as the 2011 revolution unfolded. Hanafi measures change through spoken language, as expressed through the voice of hundreds of Egyptians, making up a snapshot of the country in its newly found facets.
For more information: Visit the fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.
