Cairo: On any given evening Cairo's Tahrir Square creaks under the weight of its own recent history: trinket-sellers flog martyrs' pendants, veterans of the uprising hold up spent police bullets recovered from the ground, and an ad hoc street cinema screens YouTube compilations of demonstrators and security forces clashing under clouds of teargas.

This is collective memory by the people, for the people with no state functionaries around to curate what is remembered or forgotten.

"Egyptians are highly sensitive about official attempts to write history and create state-sponsored narratives about historical events," says Khalid Fahmi, one of the country's leading historians. "When Hosni Mubarak was vice-president in the 1970s he was himself on a government committee tasked with writing or rather rewriting the history of the 1952 revolution to suit the political purposes of the elite at that time. That's exactly the kind of thing we want to avoid."

Less than a week after the fall of Mubarak, the professor received a phone call from the head of Egypt's national archives asking him to oversee a unique new project that would document the country's dramatic political and social upheaval this year and make it available for generations of Egyptians to come.

"I was initially very reluctant," says Fahmi. "I didn't want people to think we were producing one definitive narrative of the revolution. But then I started thinking about the possibilities, and suddenly I got excited."

And so the Committee to Document the 25th January Revolution was born. Staffed by volunteers and drawing on everything from official records and insurrectionary pamphlets to multimedia footage and updates on Twitter and Facebook, the project aims, in Fahmi's words, "to gather as much primary data on the revolution as possible and deposit it in the archives so that Egyptians now and in the future can construct their own narratives about this pivotal period."

Hours of testimony

The project will also collect hundreds of hours of recorded testimony from those involved in the struggle to bring down Mubarak whether they supported the revolution or not.

It is an exercise fraught with difficulties, particularly at a time when the question of who gets to speak for the revolution is being bitterly contested on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere.

"Documenting the revolution sounded like an easy thing, but what is the revolution?" asks Fahmi. "When did it start? When did it end? What constitutes participation in the revolution is it only those who went down to Tahrir, or is it also the doctors who worked extra-long hours in their hospitals to treat the wounded? What about a police officer who fought the protesters is he a part of the revolution or not?"

Over the past six months the ruling military junta has sought to limit the scope of the revolution both rhetorically and legally.

It is a conflict over ownership of the process of revolutionary change.

Working groups decided to alter the "start date" of their enquiries moving it from January 14, the day the Tunisian president Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali was forced from office, back to June 2010 when the Alexandrian youth Khalid Said was killed in broad daylight by two police officers. The "finish date" of their project the moment the committee formally considers the revolution to have ended remains the most controversial of all, and is still up in the air.

But Fahmi hopes this latest initiative could herald a fundamental change in the way Egyptians view their relationship with state information and by extension, their relationship with the state itself.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd