Exploration and consolidation in the trajectory of creative careers [Talent Search]

This work too:https://t.co/n4Crt9iedm

Plus the recent one, studying changes in explore/exploit behavior within success / career dynamics https://t.co/eMWV5qvoXU

— Artjoms Šeļa (@artjomshl) July 17, 2021

From the abstract of the linked article:

Hot streaks dominate the main impact of creative careers. Despite their ubiquitous nature across a wide range of creative domains, it remains unclear if there is any regularity underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we develop computational methods using deep learning and network science and apply them to novel, large-scale datasets tracing the career outputs of artists, film directors, and scientists, allowing us to build high-dimensional representations of the artworks, films, and scientific publications they produce. By examining individuals' career trajectories within the underlying creative space, we find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused in what they work on after the hot streak begins. Crucially, we find that hot streaks are associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak. Overall, these results unveil among the first identifiable regularity underlying the onset of hot streaks, which appears universal across diverse creative domains, suggesting that a sequential view of creative strategies that balances experimentation and implementation may be particularly powerful for producing long-lasting contributions, which may have broad implications for identifying and nurturing creative talents.

If I look at my own career, my undergraduate years were one's of exploration, which I then consolidated through my MA Thesis on "Kubla Khan." I went off to graduate school where I did more exploration. I took English lit courses in my department while at the same time working on computational linguistics with David Hays and reading in the whole cognitive science literature on language. Consolidation through my disseration, "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory." Then things and stuff for twenty years while writing a series of articles with David Hays and doing Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution with Richard Friedhoff. Explore and consolidate while doing Beethoven's Anvil (2001) and consolidate after with a series of four papers on literary topics for PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. That's the period when I wrote up my notes on Attractor-Nets, a kind of consolidation stretching over my whole career from symbolic computation in the 1970s to complex dynamics (Walter Freeman) in the music book. Since then....