Creativity on Demand: Cognition, Materiality, and Sociality in Improvisation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the situated character of creativity via a qualitative analysis of improvisational theatre performances. Across these papers I demonstrate how creativity emerges out of the relations between actors, audiences, and material settings. Chapter two analyzes the cognitive processes through which improvisers generate new ideas during live performances. In this chapter I highlight limitations in contemporary sociological research using dual-process models, demonstrating how improvised interactions feature elements of order and disruption, how improvisers develop propensities in their reliance on automatic and deliberate cognition, and how creativity emerges in large part through automatic responses to the social and material contingencies of a live performance. Chapter three analyzes the role of the material environment in the creativity of improvisers. In this chapter I develop a novel account of how affordances are perceived and enacted, one that can be used to bridge the gap between cognition and materiality in cultural analysis. Chapter four analyzes the social-psychological skills employed by improvisers to tailor their creativity to live audiences. Specifically, I find that, although improvisation is an inherently uncertain process, improvisers are able to put on successful shows consistently through their ability to generate expressive enthusiasm (“work the room”) make inferences about the mental and emotional states of audiences (“read the room”), orient their performance style to the inferred preferences of audiences (“feed the room”), and make effective use of theatre space (“play to the room”). Chapters 2-4 of this dissertation are presented as stand-alone articles. While each paper has a distinct conceptual and analytical focus, taken together they establish creativity as a situated phenomenon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".