Database of Dreams (eBook)

The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity

Lemov Rebecca Lemov (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2015
368 Seiten
Yale University Press (Verlag)
978-0-300-21664-6 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.11.2015
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Technikgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Sozialpsychologie
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 0-300-21664-5 / 0300216645
• ISBN-13: 978-0-300-21664-6 / 9780300216646