Database of Dreams : The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity
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| Title: | Database of Dreams : The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity |
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| Description: | 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. |
| Authors: | Rebecca Lemov |
| Resource Type: | eBook. |
| Subjects: | Big data--History--20th century, Sociology--Research--History--20th century, Psychology--Research--History--20th century, Psychology--Data processing--History--20th century, Sociology--Data processing--History--20th century, Dreams--Data processing--History--20th century |
| Categories: | SCIENCE / History, PSYCHOLOGY / Cultural Psychology, SCIENCE / Cognitive Science |
| Database: | eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) |
| Abstract: | 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. |
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| ISBN: | 9780300209525 9780300216646 |
