Tuesday 8 February 2011

Today I defined creativity... Here's the definition

Here are the results of some work that I have been doing to capture in words a definition of creativity, as we understand and use the word 'creativity'.


[Ok so the timing in the title of this blog post is perhaps a little misleading... Rome wasn't built in a day and I didn't do this work all in one day... ]

The idea behind this work is that when we talk about what creativity is, certain words keep on cropping up as they are strongly associated with creativity. If we can capture those words, then they will collectively form a definition of creativity.

What I have done is to analyse discussions of creativity, to find what words appear significantly more often in such discussions (compared to discussions on unrelated topics). This gave me a list of 374 words. I've condensed this list by grouping words together that mean similar things and analysing the results, identifying 20 themes in the words.

Here are my results: 20 aspects of creativity. I propose that the combination of these 20 aspects collectively form a definition of creativity.

What do you think?

MY DEFINITION OF CREATIVITY







As an aside - for those who like to see the nuts and bolts of research:
The main word clusters identified during this
work, that assisted my work along the way

2 comments:

  1. WOW! that looks like the fruit of a lot of work - I know how long you have been playing with this concept and it is good to see you are winning!

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  2. Awesome, Anna! Well done.
    I can see some overlap with what I've found too, which might suggest we're on the right track :)
    Looking forward to seeing you reduce that into 1 or 2 sentences!!! Good luck!
    Your Aussie PhD mate,
    Carly
    P.S. Let's try again to organise that Skype date with Amy.

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