Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity

By Rebecca Lemov

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300209525
• ISBN13: 9780300209525
• Release Date: November 2015
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.3"