An Interactive Atlas of Objectivism
Incomplete but Interactive Network Graphs and Trivia Quizzes
Post-socialist Press (posocap.com) 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 on Peikoffian and 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 by a data crawler and scraper written to document 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.
The article ended with a comment or footnote indicating an intention to follow up with a more complete, cleaner second pass at data collection. It didn’t mention a timeline, though, so the credibility of this blog hopefully hasn’t been called into question.
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 Updated Objectivist Substack List
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 search.
Although many new blogs were discovered, the list is still likely incomplete. Please report any omissions.
“Exploring ideas from the perspective of Objectivism”.
The Ayn Rand Society, affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division
Author of Oze Unleased.
Author of Loving Life, Rational Egoism, and hundreds of essays; host of the Under Standing podcast; executive director of Objective Standard Institute; editor in chief of The Objective Standard (journal)
Books include: What Justice Demands, Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, Illuminating Ayn Rand, and Why American Nationalism Is For Me.
I teach philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, where I’m a senior fellow at the Civitas Institute. I’m co-editor of *A Companion to Ayn Rand* (Wiley, 2016), *Foundations of a Free Society* (UPP, 2019) and *Two Philosophers* (UPP, 2026).
Objectivist philosopher (PhD Columbia). Latest books: *How We Know* and *Ayn Rand’s Philosophic Achievement*. Taught: U.Texas/Austin, Hunter College (CUNY), New School for Social Research, the Ayn Rand Institute. More at Wikipedia.
Fairly certain this is the same Jackson Upmann, but he may write on other topics on this substack.
Reinterpreting Ayn Rand through the lens of The Living Ego
VP of Education and Senior Fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Ex-christian.
Associate Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute
Nikos Sotirakopoulos (Objectobot)
Memes, Quotes, Comics, and Opinions promoting Objectivism
Author of THE TYRANNY OF NEED and LIBERTARIANISM: The Perversion of Liberty. Founding Editor & Publisher of THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVIST (1979-1990). Former Chairman of the Board, and now Distinguished Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute.
Post-socialist Press (Ason Rand)
A new perspective on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, focusing on the law of cause and effect
Autonomia — Articles about voyages, the world and works of art
Commentary from a filmmaker and Objectivist
Leverages Ayn Rand’s moral framework to help business leaders tackle ideological challenges
Commentary from an Objectivist perspective
Ayn Rand Institute’s Chairman of the Board and former CEO.
General political blogs and culturally linked off-topic stacks (i.e., Daniel Donnelley, Don’t Let It Go, The Applied Libertarian, etc.) are currently excluded but can be at added at the author’s suggestion.
What’s Available
At the time of writing, you can access the Python-based network graphs of substacks on WhoNeeds.it. That site was built using a GitHub account that has been locked for nearly a week. For that reason, a separate, enhanced version of the graph widget was written using the R language. The newer graph is available here.
For those with an interest in AI code generation, note that the Python version was generated using GitHub Co-pilot and the human (me) prompting, testing, and correcting errors. The R version is completely human-written, on the other hand. Surprisingly, they both took about the same amount of time. Let me know if you find quality differences.
The newer graph supports scrolling, zooming, filtering, images, and external links. It does not (yet) have a separate tag for Substack.