Social Discovery: Scholarly Response

Yesterday, in my post, "Experiments with Social Discovery," I talked about my efforts to get friends, peers, and enthusiasts involved in my research project, focused on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Today, I'd like to continue on in detailing my efforts to contact professors and scholars in fields pertinent to my area of research. It's been a rough road so far, but I'm hoping that I'll get some good responses sometime soon.

I've sent emails to a few pretty renowned Randian philosophers, and while I haven't received any response back, I'm still trusting that something good will come of it, and I'll have been glad to wait a little bit. Leonard Peikoff, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute and author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, uses a number of different digital resources to propagate Objectivist ideas, so I figured that he would be a good person to talk to about creativity, the Internet, and The Fountainhead. I left a message on his website, and now I wait.

I messaged Shoshana Milgram Knapp, a leading Randian scholar who presented a lecture series at the Smithsonian Institute on Ayn Rand in 2010 and who teaches The Fountainhead and others of Rand's writings as key works in her courses at Virginia Tech. She has a number of online resources, among them a great lecture investigating The Fountainhead as a modern classic and explaining how the novel can be used in contemporary learning. I'm still waiting for a response, but again, I have high hopes.



I've read a couple of articles by scholars from the Ayn Rand Institute and the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and emailed their authors, but again, no luck as of yet in terms of responses. I tried emailing the authors of all of the articles that I'll be using in my research paper, and with only a few exceptions, I've been able to track down email addresses and sent off messages. I actually got some really good responses from a couple of the professors. I made a blog post recently where I gave a review of Quest Atlantis, an online learning community dedicated to the interplay of ideas presented in The Fountainhead; I was pleasantly surprised to receive responses from both of the professors responsible for the article that I had referenced! I seriously jumped for joy tonight when I saw the second response, as I've been really worrying about this whole social discovery thing, and it's only now starting to work for me.

I had kind of funny "scholarly response" tonight through Facebook. I had tried to find an email address for a Dr. Robert Powell, the author of one of the articles I had read, but I could only find a Facebook post. I figured, "How many Robert Powells on Facebook can be avid fans of Ayn Rand?", so I took the chance and messaged him asking him to answer a couple of questions on the relationship between modern media and creativity. I was very excited today to get a response from him, only the response was a little bit different from the one that I expected:

Mr Bayles,
I think you've confused me with someone else - I'm not a "Dr" of anything (PhD, MD, etc). I am something of an Ayn Rand fan, though. I think the role of the creator has not become any more or less individualistic than it has been in the past, but, as technology has changed (and at least in theory improved), there is the potential for creative acts to be more collaborative. Imagine ancient Greeks collaborating on a play across more than a couple of miles separation!

I had to chuckle at this, but I was glad to find another enthusiast with whom to discuss Rand's works. We'll see where this next week takes me. I've had a lot more success in social discovery than I had originally anticipated I would have, and that's been a great encouragement. Late nights deliberating over what to write payed off, I guess. Also, interviewed a BYU student today about his feelings on The Fountainhead. Was able to contact him through Google+, and had a fun little chat about his experience with Rand's works. 

Oh, additionally, I got approved for guest account to Quest Atlantis, so I'll be diving into that this weekend and seeing where it takes me in terms of my research. Anyway, that's all for tonight, but things are looking up for social discovery...