Content area
Full Text
This book tells the fascinating story of social scientist Bert Kaplan's long-forgotten mid-twentieth-century effort to build a "total archive" that could house essentially all data from the social and behavioral sciences. Lemov dubs this archive the "database of dreams," evoking both the nature of the data being collected and the grandiosity (and perhaps ultimate failure) of Kaplan's plan. Kaplan was a Harvard Ph.D. who worked under Henry Murray, Talcott Parsons, and especially Clyde Kluckhohn. Like many anthropologists at the time, he first studied Native Americans in the Southwest. Yet by the early 1950s, as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, his consuming interest became creating the database of dreams. Heading up the Committee on Primary Records in Culture and Personality for the National Research Council, he reached out to scores of social scientists, asking them to donate their research data to his database. In doing so, Lemov maintains, Kaplan was a visionary. Before others, he recognized the problem of social science data disappearing from a lack of preservation. He also understood that the lack of access to other researchers' data—and hence the...