Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity.

New Haven: Yale University Press (YUP), 2015. 1st ed.. Hardback octavo, dustjacket, very good condition (in very good dustjacket), minor edgewear jacket, tiny dent bottom edge front cover. 354 pp. Rebecca Lemov reports on Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan who set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, just before the dawn of the digital age (and the later big data projects). Kaplan, along with anthropologist A. I. Hallowell and a team of researchers, gathered research from a varied range of non-European subjects among remote and largely non-literate peoples around the world. Kaplan saw future researchers using the data through the cutting-edge Readex machine. However, technological developments and the obsolescence of the theoretical framework rendered the project irrelevant, and soon it was forgotten. The database was intended as a repository of humankind’s most elusive ways of being human, that is, an anthropological archive. This is a book about those encounters between scientists and subjects, between knowledge and machines - as well as the data that flowed out of them and the ways these were preserved or not preserved.