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.... In a scrupulously researched and captivating new book, Rebecca Lemov recounts the story of Kaplan's quest and brings to light an informative and disturbing chapter in the prehistory of Big Data."--Dust jacket.
The idea in the 1930s and 1940s was to build a system by which people's actions and behaviors--eventually even their thoughts--could be predicted and controlled. To cure society's ills was the goal. The early "social scientists" ran animals, then men, through mazes, strapping them to galvanic skin response recorders and "punishment grills." With World War II came federal money and new techniques, as vast amounts of information were collected, filed, and fed to computers so that everything from personal preferences to national loyalty could be measured, targeted, studied, and changed. And with the Cold War, well-intentioned programs took a sinister turn. With CIA encouragement, and using drugs and psychosurgery, scientists turned to brainwashing, interrogation techniques, and remote-control behavior. Author Lemov traces how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of these human engineers left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.--From publisher description.
The idea in the 1930s and 1940s was to build a system by which people's actions and behaviors--eventually even their thoughts--could be predicted and controlled. To cure society's ills was the goal. The early "social scientists" ran animals, then men, through mazes, strapping them to galvanic skin response recorders and "punishment grills." With World War II came federal money and new techniques, as vast amounts of information were collected, filed, and fed to computers so that everything from personal preferences to national loyalty could be measured, targeted, studied, and changed. And with the Cold War, well-intentioned programs took a sinister turn. With CIA encouragement, and using drugs and psychosurgery, scientists turned to brainwashing, interrogation techniques, and remote-control behavior. Author Lemov traces how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of these human engineers left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.--From publisher description.
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.... In a scrupulously researched and captivating new book, Rebecca Lemov recounts the story of Kaplan's quest and brings to light an informative and disturbing chapter in the prehistory of Big Data."--Dust jacket.
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