Database of Dreams : The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity Hardback
by Rebecca Lemov
Hardback
Description
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.
Information
-
Item not Available
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:368 pages
- Publisher:Yale University Press
- Publication Date:05/01/2016
- Category:
- ISBN:9780300209525
Information
-
Item not Available
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:368 pages
- Publisher:Yale University Press
- Publication Date:05/01/2016
- Category:
- ISBN:9780300209525