Boing Boing: Quantifying creativity is difficult, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. In a new paper published in Nature Communications titled "Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers," a group of researchers compiled datasets of career outputs for 2,128 visual artists; 4,337 film directors; and 20,040 scientists, using deep learning to find patterns in the timing and success of each of their creative "hot streaks."
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I don’t know all of the details about this study but it seems that they pooled a very diverse range of people to get unbiased results. I would be interested in seeing the methods that they used or the questions that they asked to get this kind of data on people’s lives, especially in instances that span a decent amount of time. I’m not really sure how “exploration followed by exploitation” would be represented in all of these people’s lives but it is interesting that this can be used to see if someone is going to be successful or have a “hot streak.” I think that this applies to the world of theatre and management because it is such a creative work that needs to “snowball.” The art of live theatre, on every level, needs to not be told no at the beginning of the process because who knows how that idea could turn into something successful in the end?
The idea that creativity can snowball like that is an interesting one if it’s allowed. The article does mention that this could be super unhealthy because if you’re spending 16 hours a day working and getting distracted, you might be missing the necessities like food, water, sleep, or higher level stuff like your significant other. They mention the one band that came out with three albums during the pandemic lockdown period and the pandemic is definitely a sink or swim for personality types and artist types. It's really cool that the band was able to be so creative during a time when many of us could barely get out of bed in the morning. This is just an overview article so it doesn’t really go into the specifics of the data, but it does mention that they compared all sorts of different creatives and academics and finding data to compare them must be quite difficult.
In a new scientific study, a group of researchers compiled data regarding career outputs for 2,128 visual artists, 4,337 film directors, and 20,040 scientists. From their diverse pool of people, they used deep learning to find patterns regarding each’s creative "hot streaks--especially regarding timing and success. They found that across all three disciplines, individuals tend to explore diverse styles and topics but focus in on a few after the hot streaks begin. Reading the title, I was originally weary of this article--how is it possible to quantify and study creativity? After reading it however, I would agree that this is how a lot of artists work--drawing on inspiration and looking at a variety of sources before beginning an in-depth study through their individual work. This kind of study does not necessarily dictate the formula for finding the hot streaks, but it points out trends that we ourselves as artists can explore as well. Creativity is not formulaic, rather it is the process of going from “exploration to exploitation”.
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