A Dictionary of the Revolution

A Dictionary of the Revolution documents the rapid amplification of public political speech following the uprising of 25 January 2011 in Egypt.

You can explore the Dictionary in Arabic here, and interact with a diagram describing the relationships between the terms in the Dictionary in English translation here. The content of the Dictionary is currently only available in Arabic.

Material for the Dictionary was collected in conversations with around 200 individuals in Egypt from March to August 2014. Participants reacted to vocabulary cards containing 160 words that were frequently used in political conversation, talking about what the words meant to them, who they heard using them, and how their meanings had changed since the revolution.

The Arabic website contains 125 imagined dialogues woven from transcription of this speech.

Each word is accompanied by a diagram that shows its relationship to other words in the Dictionary. The thicker the line connecting two words, the closer their relationship is. The diagrams are the result of an analysis of the complete text of the Dictionary.

A Dictionary of the Revolution is a project by Amira Hanafi.

The website was built by Youssef Faltas.

Questions or comments? Write to us at qamos@qamosalthawra.com.

Participants

Vocabulary Cards

  
  

Vocabulary Cards for A Dictionary of the Revolution is a set of 160 cards housed in a palm-sized box. Each card holds a term that was frequently used in public political speech between 2011 and 2013 in Egypt. The object encourages conversation, and can be a game for an individual or a group.

The terms are in four categories:

Published Translations

• Index on Censorship Vol. 46.01 Spring 2017
• Ibraaz Platform 10: Where to Now?, 30 September 2016

Press

• Crafting a dictionary of Egypt’s revolution Mary Atkinson, Middle East Eye, 8 April 2015
• A Dictionary of the Revolution – so we don’t forget uprising Marcia Lynx Qualey, Your Middle East, 20 February 2015
• De la A a la Z, el diccionario de la truncada revolucion egipcia El Mundo 9 November 2014
• Egypt: After the revolution comes the battle for language Patrick Kingsley, The Guardian, 18 July 2014
• New website seeks to define the vocabulary of the Egyptian revolution Marwa Morgan, Daily News Egypt, 4 June 2014
• As palavras se movem no Cairo Diogo Bercito, Folha de S.Paolo, 1 December 2013
• A Dictionary of the Revolution documents Egyptian events in colloquial language Yasser Sultan, Al Hayat, 10 October 2013
• ‘Thug’, ‘Infiltrator’: What do these words mean to you? Mideast Posts, Marcia Lynx Qualey, 29 September 2013
• A Dictionary of the Revolution…a popular documentation of the vocabulary of the Egyptian revolution Ahmed Elhawary, Al Masry Al Youm, 23 September 2013

Thanks

First and foremost, I'd like to thank the nearly 200 individuals who enthusiastically engaged with the project and shared their viewpoints.

I'm very grateful to the following people who contributed in different ways to the project:

Ahmed Refaat
Youssef Faltas
Ahmed Elhawary
Magda Magdy
Sondos Ayman
Abdo Hemdan
Mahmoud Belal
Amanda KM
Shatha Al-Deghady
Nini Ayach
Hany Hommos
Amado Alfadni
Amani Hanafi
Cheryl Weisser
Hussein Hanafi

This project was funded by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and the digital publication commissioned by Rhizome.

The scale of the project would not have been possible without the additional support of generous individuals who made contributions to a 2015 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.