Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300209525)

An acclaimed science historian uncovers the fascinating story of a "lost" project to unlock humanity's common denominator that prefigured the emergence of Big Data

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 largely non-literate peoples around the globe. 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.

Author: Rebecca Lemov
ISBN-10: 0300209525
ISBN-13: 9780300209525
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/24/2015
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 10/01/2015