book cover: Rebecca Lemov: Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (2015)
Publication
Database of Dreams: the Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity

Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights promised by Rorschach tests and other innovative scientific protocols. Kaplan, along with anthropologist A. I. Hallowell and a team of researchers, sought out a varied range of non-European subjects-among remote and non-literate peoples around the globe and elsewhere. Recording their dreams, stories, and innermost thoughts in a vast database, Kaplan envisioned future researchers accessing the data through the cutting-edge Readex machine. Almost immediately, however, technological developments and the obsolescence of the theoretical framework rendered the project irrelevant, and eventually it was forgotten. In a scrupulously researched and captivating new book, Rebecca Lemov recounts the story of Kaplan's quest and brings to light an informative and disturbing chapter in the prehistory of Big Data.

Publisher
Yale University Press
ISBN
978-0-300-20952-5
Year
2015
Pages
354
Language
English