![]() Chapters 7 and 8 provide captivating accounts of the relationships not only between these researchers (with histories of the Chicago School of Sociology and Yale social science sprinkled in), but also those between the Native subjects and white researchers. In addition to the Rorschach and the TAT, Dorothy Eggan's collection of Hopi Indians' dreams and George and Louise Spindler's life-history research on the Menominee Indians were key parts of Kaplan's database. The next couple of chapters track Kaplan's rise to modest academic stardom, first at Harvard, then more broadly through relationships with leading figures such as Margaret Mead, Otto Klineberg, and Ralph Linton. Lemov reports the striking fact that fully one-half to two-thirds of all the data that Kaplan ultimately collected came from Native American subjects, despite the project's much larger pretensions. Shifting back to the history of science, Chapter 4 explains how Kaplan's graduate research on the Zuni Indians of the American Southwest was part of a long research tradition in anthropology that targeted Native groups in that region. Lemov's third chapter provides a lengthy history of microtechnology, which culminated in the Microcard. ![]() She begins by providing a history of projective testing, particularly the Rorschach Test and Thematic Apperception Test, which were responsible for yielding a great deal of the "subjective" (read: ambiguous, controversial) data that Kaplan collected. Over the course of ten richly-packed chapters, Lemov develops a broad arc that encompasses much of mid-twentieth-century social science and technology. ![]() It houses an unprecedented collection of culture-and-personality research, including tens of thousands of one-of-a-kind documents that researchers today should not ignore.Īlthough Bert Kaplan is the book's central character, the story in fact is about much more than him. Although his efforts to create a total archive foundered by the mid-1960s, the Committee did succeed in compiling the Microcard Publications of Primary Records in Culture and Personality, which remains accessible in many libraries today. He also understood that the lack of access to other researchers' data-and hence the lack of sharing and comparing of that information-impoverished science. Before others, he recognized the problem of social science data disappearing from a lack of preservation. In doing so, Lemov maintains, Kaplan was a visionary. 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. ![]() Yet by the early 1950s, as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, his consuming interest became creating the database of dreams. Like many anthropologists at the time, he first studied Native Americans in the Southwest. who worked under Henry Murray, Talcott Parsons, and especially Clyde Kluckhohn. 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. ![]() 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. ![]()
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