Database of dreams

• Verfasst von: Lemov, Rebecca [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Database of dreams
• Titelzusatz: the lost quest to catalog humanity
• Verf.angabe: Rebecca Lemov
• Verlagsort: New Haven ; London
• Verlag: Yale University Press
• E-Jahr: 2015
• Jahr: [2015]
• Umfang: xii, 354 Seiten
• ISBN: 978-0-300-20952-5
• Schlagwörter: (s)Erinnerung / (s)Geschichte / (s)Datenbank / (s)Technischer Fortschritt
• Sprache: eng
• RVK-Notation: AK 39950
• K10plus-PPN: 835916235

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 non-literate peoples around the globe and elsewhere. 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. In a scrupulously researched and captivating new book, Rebecca Lemov recounts the story of Kaplan's quest and brings to light an informative and disturbing chapter in the prehistory of Big Data