Egyptian revolution

A Dictionary of the Revolution by Amira Hanafi was the first Arabic e-lit piece to come to my mind when thinking of what to present in the ELO salon. It is available in English and Arabic so, the English-speaking audience will be able to engage in the reading process. This piece is based on the idea of the January 25th revolution in Egypt, which is a special event to all Egyptians. I thought that the Western audience would be interested in knowing more about this glorious revolution. Most importantly, the technique of weaving different voices into one text and visualizing it in a wheel-shaped dictionary is unique. In addition to all these causes that make A Dictionary of the Revolution a good fit to the ELO salon’s presentation, this piece is the winner of the New Media Writing Prize and The Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature.

The process of creating this piece is interesting. The digital artist Amira Hanafi did meetings with 200 persons from 6 Egyptian governorates: Alexandria, Aswan, Cairo, Mansoura, Sinai, and Suez in the time period from March to August 2014. She asked those people to choose a card from a vocabulary box containing 160 words in Egyptian colloquial related to the Egyptian revolution. People were required to speak about the chosen word namely, its definition and the related accounts. The interviews’ recordings were transcribed and woven by the artist to end up with multi-voiced storytelling on the Egyptian revolution.

This is a talk about police. The text is read by Alex from A dictionary of the revolution, a multi-media project that attempted to document the evolving language of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

The project's digital publication contains 125 texts, woven from the voices of hundreds of people who were asked to define words used frequently in conversations in public from 2011-2014. Material for the dictionary was collected in Egypt from March to August 2014.

Nearly 200 participants reacted to vocabulary cards containing 160 terms, talking about what the words meant to them, who they heard using them, and how their meanings had changed since the revolution. The text of the dictionary is woven from transcription of this speech.

The project's digital publication is accessible in Arabic and English translation at http://qamosalthawra.com. The website also gives access to an archive of edited sound clips, images, and transcriptions.

A dictionary of the revolution won the 2019 Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature, the 2018 New Media Writing Prize, and the 2017 Artraker Award for Changing the Narrative.

Source: ELO 2020