145 research outputs found
Hot Streaks in Artistic, Cultural, and Scientific Careers
The hot streak, loosely defined as winning begets more winnings, highlights a
specific period during which an individual's performance is substantially
higher than her typical performance. While widely debated in sports, gambling,
and financial markets over the past several decades, little is known if hot
streaks apply to individual careers. Here, building on rich literature on
lifecycle of creativity, we collected large-scale career histories of
individual artists, movie directors and scientists, tracing the artworks,
movies, and scientific publications they produced. We find that, across all
three domains, hit works within a career show a high degree of temporal
regularity, each career being characterized by bursts of high-impact works
occurring in sequence. We demonstrate that these observations can be explained
by a simple hot-streak model we developed, allowing us to probe quantitatively
the hot streak phenomenon governing individual careers, which we find to be
remarkably universal across diverse domains we analyzed: The hot streaks are
ubiquitous yet unique across different careers. While the vast majority of
individuals have at least one hot streak, hot streaks are most likely to occur
only once. The hot streak emerges randomly within an individual's sequence of
works, is temporally localized, and is unassociated with any detectable change
in productivity. We show that, since works produced during hot streaks garner
significantly more impact, the uncovered hot streaks fundamentally drives the
collective impact of an individual, ignoring which leads us to systematically
over- or under-estimate the future impact of a career. These results not only
deepen our quantitative understanding of patterns governing individual
ingenuity and success, they may also have implications for decisions and
policies involving predicting and nurturing individuals with lasting impact
Geographic clustering of economic activity: The case of prominent western visual artists
This article compiles original data relating to artists’ place of birth and work migration patterns using various art history dictionaries. The broad historic pattern, from the 13th to the 20th century, of the birth locations of prominent artists is examined, followed by a detailed study of the work migration patterns of prominent artists in two important situations, namely Renaissance Italy and France in part of the 19th century. The evidence indicates a marked clustering of activity of prominent artists, both arising from birth location and migration patterns. Some possible explanations for the observed patterns are briefly outlined. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Artists, Migration, Clustering, Z10,
Artistic styles: revisiting the analysis of modern artists’ careers
Modern artists, Age, Life cycle, Creativity, N80, Z11,
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