The body of work on Objectivism and Objectivists is large enough to overwhelm anyone trying to cover it in a reasonable amount of time. Recently, this was an issue when trying to catch up on the last twenty years of posts and publications by the Objective Standard Institute (OSI) and the sister company that is its print publication, The Objective Standard (TOS). To provide a broad, high-level understanding of their contents and history, data scraping and text mining were leveraged—the plots and tables below show the results, and a database of citations is available on Zotero.
Data collection produced citation data for 2,574 TOS articles, 391 OSI posts, and 79 additional articles from Prometheus Foundation—a related entity that both funds and critiques OSI. The documents were penned by 229 authors over the course of approximately 20 years.
Since Prometheus Foundation is focused on funding and commentary of OSI and its other grantees, their articles were excluded from the text mining data set but are available as citations in this Zotero collection. OSI published a combination of editorial articles and organizational announcements and were therefore retained in the text mining data set, with TOS’ much larger corpus of posts. Zotero collections for OSI and TOS are also available.
Some posts were tagged by topic, however the vast majority of the tags were only used once, limiting their value here, but with some repeated tags such as “Ayn Rand” and “Objectivism”.
Although citation data was not restricted, the full text of some articles was partially or completely paywalled. To avoid biasing the statistics used to evaluate the data, very short posts such as those that were paywalled or those missing key metadata were dropped from the analysis of the raw text, leaving 1,773 articles in the text mining corpus (318 from OSI and 1,458 from TOS).