Inside a Massive Database of Dreams
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Imagine opening a box that contained the inner life of the people of a lost civilization: Their thoughts, their desires, their dreams.
What would that look like? Today, that might mean a trove of emails captured by the NSA. But to Bert Kaplan and his team of psychologists in the 1950s, it was millions and millions of notecards filled with text documenting answers to Rorschach tests, descriptions of dreams and life histories, mostly from Native Americans and non-European participants.
Rebecca Lemov came across Kaplan's box in the Library of Congress, the first one to do so, according to the librarian on duty. Lemov is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, and wrote the book a "Database of Dreams" about Kaplan's database. She says that it can teach us a great deal in the age of big data.
Check out some photos of Kaplan's note cards below.
