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 nonEuropean subjects among remote and largely illiterate 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.

Genres: History, Psychology, Science, Nonfiction, Technology, Sociology

368 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 2015

Reviews

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author's vernacular effluence may stupify casual lectors. And boy does she love big words. Without providing definition (makes it all the more fun!). I'm sure there's a good idea behind this book and this book isn't a good demonstration of that idea. I knew where the book was going and had no idea how it was going to get there. Except that it would be a long, laborious journey.

[João Pinho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not just a book of data sets or dreams recorders, but an inspiring book about the roots of the human knowledge.