#Creativity: Exploring lay conceptualizations of creativity with Twitter hashtags.

Abstract

Twitter has become a popular platform for sharing and discussing everyday experiences, including creativity. In this study, we explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter by analyzing co-listed hashtags associated with the term #creativity in millions of tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semantic clusters, and a pre-trained language model yielded the sentiment of the underlying tweets. In addition, we compared the creativity-network to the network of the related concept of #innovation. The semantic clusters of #creativity reflect, on the one hand, well-known everyday creative domains focused on visual and digital arts, storytelling, and handicraft, suggesting an arts bias in the representation of creativity online. On the other hand, other semantic clusters paid tribute to the role of mindsets, teams, and imagination, feature business and innovation, and stress the importance of creativity for mental health. The network of #innovation had a higher prevalence of technological clusters relating to digital transformation in general and in specific areas, such as finance, education, design, and health. Both networks are mostly positive on the level of hashtags and underlying tweets, suggesting that these Twitter spheres highlight potential and success rather than obstacles and failure. Our study demonstrated the feasibility of leveraging online data to provide a bottom-up socio-cultural snapshot of lay conceptualizations of creativity, highlighting commonalities and differences with theorized conceptualizations of creativity.