Postsocialist Press has published several interactive entity‑relationship (“network”) graphs of the Objectivist movement as open access web apps. While the graphs and their underlying database are still incomplete and under active development, they are open for exploration, and users are invited to submit any corrections or additions they would like to see.
The graph web apps are currently hosted here and on WhoNeeds.It.
Context
A year ago next week, this stack published one of its first Substack articles in an attempt to find other Substack blogs that had been publishing on Ayn Rand or her philosophy of moral objectivism. The motivation was to learn about the “landscape” of a topic of interest on this platform, using data science techniques. To that end, RSS feeds were used in data crawling and scraping this data.
The results were incomplete and noisy, but it was a mildly useful first attempt. They were published within the article as a list of titles, authors, and hyperlinks.
Although a follow-up article did not soon materialize, a database of people, entities, and facts related to objectivism was created on CloudFlare D1 SQLite for the purpose of self-education. The scope of that project has grown large enough to bring us full circle to updating data on objectivism-related Substack publications as well.
The Database
The data behind the graphs consists of information on objectivists, their organizations, related Substacks, and trivia. Initial data sourcing involved reading and “data scraping” of the websites of the Ayn Rand Institute, the Objectivist Standard Institute, and The Atlas Society, in addition to blogs from the “Objectivism on Substack” article.
The programmatically collected data was very messy, i.e., it had lots of mistakes and inconsistently typed proper names, but it has been cleaned and reviewed manually. The process is ongoing, and some organizations are still missing records showing connected individuals. Corrections and contributions are welcome.
The trivia component of the website followed a similar pattern. Originally, a Python script was being used to batch process large chunks of raw text from all of Rand’s works, which in turn were used to generate multiple-choice questions and store them in the database. It generated 8,000 questions.
Unsatisfied with the quality of too high a proportion of those questions, a decision was made to limit the quiz to only manually reviewed questions. At present, only 200 of the questions have been reviewed, which are available in the quizzes on WhoNeeds.it, but hopefully this number will increase over time.
The Living Objectivist Substack Directory
Last year’s article included a directory of objectivist and Rand-related substacks, but it was based on an overly simplistic keyword search strategy that utilized Substack’s publication/note search and RSS feed scraping. This year it was expanded by manually searching the names of individuals in our D1 database on Substack’s profile search1.