Rorschach protocol of Subject #139, a 50-year-old Ojibwa man (Berens River) administered the test in the summer of 1938: one of thousands of “personality pictures” preserved in the microcard archive beginning in 1956.

My project concerns a lost history of data and a secret collection of dreams. Not just any data, and not just anyone’s dreams, though. Instead, it tells the story of industrious researchers who piled up a “mountain of data” perhaps larger in its day, in the mid-twentieth century, than any informational structure or data set ever assembled before in the social sciences. Not only was the size of the mountain unmatched -- although today, of course, it is dwarfed by countless amalgamations of data -- it was made of peculiar “stuff.”

When a Hopi grandmother dreamed of white chickens in a snowfilled evergreen forest one night, when a young man from the northeast Pakistani frontier saw visions of water snakes, when four German exchange students and several patients in a Lebanese mental hospital answered psychological test questions -- looking at inkblots, drawing pictures, filling out sentences -- all this entered researchers’ records and merged in a single archive. Soon, as a result, materials which would almost certainly not have been kept, issuing from people who did not generally write in journals (if they wrote at all), rested, preserved, in a vast database. Even today, the Library of Congress holds copies of these materials, fragments of seemingly unremarkable human lives, rendered in condensed form. A trove of over twenty-five thousand pages of raw data that no scholar or historian has examined before in published writing, this immense data bank is an attempt to preserve for the future the fleeting elements of human personal and social life.

What made such a collection possible, and why did it occur in the American social sciences, in the middle of the twentieth century, rather than some other time, some other place? How did researchers come to suppose they could render dreams and inner psychological states as data? Beginning just after World War II, while postcolonial battles and global homogenization forces swept up formerly “far away” places into a worldwide system, social scientists attempted to collect artifacts of what seemed to be disappearing: culturally specific ways of looking at the world, whether from the South Pacific or the Great Plains. Testing experts, tried to trap the data of endangered subjectivities. This research follows the course of scientific logic and action that led some to target ever more ephemeral materials for their files, making up a new science of subjectivity.