D-I-WHAT? Identifying creative domains in DIY videos on YouTube.

Abstract

Online worlds offer a massive display of people’s lives including their creative activities. In the present study, we investigated do-it-yourself (DIY) videos on YouTube to explore the type and prevalence of everyday creative behaviors. DIY is a term associated with the production of original and effective products, and, like YouTube, typically features amateur-generated content. As such, this setting allowed us to gain insight into the creative behavior that happens in our homes, garages, and front yards. Using two topic modeling approaches, STM and BERTopic, we analyzed a set of approximately 13000 videos from three mainly English-speaking countries (Australia, UK, USA) that were published between 2019 and 2021. STM identified 9 broad domains of creative behavior, such as decoration, Garden & Home, and Textiles, which are partly similar yet also extend domain classifications of established creativity measures. BERTopic identified 135 narrow topics of creative activities (e.g., Facemasks, Jewelry, Photography) that provide deep insights into the actual diversity of everyday creative behavior. Further analyses revealed differences in popularity between domains and uncovered plausible time dynamics of specific topics. Our results indicate thatleveraging data-driven approaches to study creativity in online environmentscomplements traditional methods in offering new insights on both the diversity and prevalent domains of everyday creative behavior.

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

“…One important first step has been made in the context of high school students: The Creative Behavior Questionnaire: Digital (CBQD; Hoffmann et al, 2016) measures digital creativity achievement, school-based everyday creativity, and self-expressive creativity and incorporates both digital tools, and online environments (e.g., specific platforms) as central aspects of digital creativity. Here, next steps could be to add digital creative behaviors to existing measures of everyday creativity and creative achievement (Silvia et al, 2021), drawing from the increasing density of literature in the field (e.g., al Hashimi et al, 2019;Bruno, 2022;Bruno & Canina, 2019;Ceh & Benedek, 2022;Ceh & Lebuda, 2022;Cherry & Latulipe, 2014;Gauntlett, 2018;Henriksen & Hoelting, 2017), or to develop entirely new questionnaires that map the digital creative domain, which requires systematically mapping the spheres where digital creativity is happening .…”

“…DIY-practices resemble the production of original and effective products in everyday contexts (Ceh & Benedek, 2022;Fox, 2013). DIY is well-suited to the modality of video (Wolf, 2016), which is often found online, and reflects a multitude of everyday creative behaviors, such as crafting decoration for festive events, refurbishing furniture, preparing foods and drinks, or more niche activities such as producing an outdoor oven (Ceh & Benedek, 2022). DIYcommunities consist of amateurs and expert-amateurs (Arthurs et al, 2018;Kuznetsov & Paulos, 2010).…”

“…Creativity is one such part of our everyday lives that is affected by societal and contextual challenges and circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Karwowski et al, 2021;Lopez-Persem et al, 2022) and digitalization (Bruno & Canina, 2019;Hoffmann et al, 2016;Lee & Chen, 2015). We frequently use online platforms such as Twitter to consume and contribute creative content , and through these platforms, we can gain insights into specific aspects of creative behavior, such as the topical composition of do-it-yourself videos (Ceh & Benedek, 2022), or the use of creative linguistic strategies for malevolent purposes (de Saint Laurent et al, 2020).…”

“…These publications have dealt with and extended our understanding of the outlets, topics, progress, as well as the catalyzers of scientific research about creativity, but are (intentionally) biased towards scientific agency. It has been suggested that creativity researchers could utilize readily available data from online environments to understand creativity in more natural settings (Ceh & Benedek, 2022) but there seems to be a systematic lack of such studies (Mejia et al, 2021). This is a critical gap when considering creativity as a distributed phenomenon, namely as a "social, dialogical, and cultural process" (Literat & Glăveanu, 2018) with a strong focus on the contextual factors of creativity, including the interactions between people, objects, and time (Glăveanu, 2014).…”

“…A platform like Twitter, which enables interactions between people in shared contexts (i.e., through hashtags) and allows researchers to investigate the characteristics of these dialogical processes, might bear important insights to close this gap. There is an inclination to displaying our creative behaviors on online platforms such as YouTube (Ceh & Benedek, 2022), as is reflected in motives such as inspiring others through one's creativity, receiving feedback, or getting inspired through observing or discussing creative content . Going further, it also seems plausible that people will discuss creativity above and beyond the outcomes of creative processes.…”