Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity

by Rebecca Lemov

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300216646
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/24/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Rebecca Lemov is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University and past visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She is the author of World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, named a 2006 New York Times Editor’s Choice. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Editorial Reviews

"Humane, hilarious, and smart . . . The book shows that, although some things are forgotten because they are unimportant, others lose importance because they are forgotten."—Science

Science

"Lemov, a professor of the History of Science at Harvard, recollects with flair, affection and dazzling detail, a post World War II project to do away with mornings after like this one: those episodes of mourning that follow some lost telling of some last secret of some human heart. . . . Riveting."—New Republic

New Republic

"A compelling account."—Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal

"Lemov’s contribution informs our understanding not only of how psychological research is managed but also of our own daily contributions, voluntary and otherwise, to a 'forever' database already being probed in increasingly intimate fashion."—Psychology Today

Psychology Today

"Humane, hilarious, and smart . . . The book shows that, although some things are forgotten because they are unimportant, others lose importance because they are forgotten."—Science

Science

"A compelling account."—Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal

2015-09-24
A detailed exploration of a historic, one-of-a-kind social archive project. Lemov (History of Science/Harvard Univ.; World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, 2005) diligently scrutinizes a long-lost collection of sociological data collected in the mid-20th century. Her excavation was a frustrating one, she notes, due to the data's whereabouts and its availability, as well as the difficulty in accessing the machines required to view them. The author traces the histories of the many evaluative scientists fascinated with projective testing data in the early 1900s and the subsequent paper trail of diagnostic results in the wake of their human psychological evaluations. Capitalizing on this need to collect social-scientific data was anthropological researcher-turned-Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan, whose pioneering societal experiments progressed from New Mexico's Zuni Pueblo to the assemblage of dream data from Native American tribal subjects (augmenting the work of American anthropologist Dorothy Eggan). It also encompassed Rorschach tests, which often revealed the hidden personality traits of participants. All of these findings were then recorded through the then-innovative yet now-vastly-outdated Microcard archival and Readex retrieval system. In her comprehensive text, dense with detailed research and intelligent speculation, Lemov ably deconstructs how the possibility of an archive could even exist in the mid-1900s, why it was stored in the way that it was, how the hybridized data storage devices actually worked, and the way Kaplan's professional modesty contributed to the eventual evaporation of his legendary project. In what she calls a "parable for our time," Lemov notes that this database, however obscure, is a reflection on the nature and behavior of modern humanity within an increasingly digitized society. Unique, well-curated brain food for readers intrigued with the human psyche and how it can be recorded, indexed, and cross-referenced.

Kirkus Reviews