Synopsis
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.
About Rebecca Lemov
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Rebecca Lemov teaches history and anthropology at the University of Washington. This is her first book.
Published November 24, 2015
by Yale University Press.
369 pages
Genres:
Health, Fitness & Dieting, History, Political & Social Sciences, Computers & Technology, Professional & Technical, Science & Math, Business & Economics.
Non-fiction