Citizen Science in a Transnational Community of Memory: Brazilian Zionist Youth Movements

“Dror, Ontem e Hoje” is a project that adopted a citizen science approach for documenting a transnational community of memory. Terra (2016) reviews citizen science initiatives in the Humanities: ICT technologies can be employed to mobilize and involve large populations in tasks traditionally carried out by scholars. Assignments include transcription of manuscripts; improvement of data; expert knowledge.

The Brazilian Habonim Dror youth movement commemorated its 60th anniversary in 2008 in an event that took place at the Brazilian Kibbutz Bror Chail. Members of the movement from Brazil and other countries gathered in Israel and participated in its preparation that included an exhibition of related documents, publications and photos.

This became a starting point for an ongoing process of documentation of the youth movements that constituted Habonim Dror, later opened to all Zionist youth movements in Brazil. This process included re-organization of the archive of Kibbutz Bror Chail; digitisation of the fonds of the youth movement; development of a cataloguing system (based on REI Archive Network Israel) and vocabularies; an infrastructure supporting access and interaction with the digital documentation. In cooperation with the Memory Center of the Jewish Museum of São Paulo the scope was later enlarged

The infrastructure includes a database hosting the digital documents and the catalog; support for the volunteer cataloguers; an interactive web site providing access to the documents and upload of additional documents, stories and comments; a digital library of available books and articles uploaded to the site.

Other activities include: two books and other publications, social activities, meetings with present members of the youth movement, a series of online webinars. Additional ongoing initiatives include the cataloging and digitisation of a large personal archive of the founder of the movement in Brazil; plans for an oral history project; facilitating research by young scholars.