Creative Collaboration

• Considerable previous literature on formal collaborations
  • Bureaucratic organizations
  • E.g., work groups, academic papers, films
• Relatively less research on creative collaboration networks (though see Uzzi and Spiro 2005)
  • Should resemble a mixture of formal collaborations and voluntary groups
  • Likely formed following some of the general mechanisms leading to formal collaborations

Collaboration is a Two-Mode Process

• Actors (mode one) and projects (mode two)
  • Projects represent an organization
  • As an organization, projects can act
• Ambiguous agency (Brieger 1974)
  • Sometimes actors create and join projects
  • Sometimes projects recruit actors
• We cannot assume that tie formation is driven exclusively by the actors

Collaboration is a Dynamic Process

• All networks are dynamic networks (Barabási)
• A project begins and ends at particular times
• Actors join and acquire experience through participating in a series of projects

Our Interest

How do ties form in the context of creative collaborative networks?

Popular Explanations for Tie Formation

(Crossley [2009]; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook [2001]; Powell, White, Koput, and Owen‐Smith [2005]; Rivera, Soderstrom, and Uzzi [2010])

Preferential Attachment

• Right-skewed degree distribution (Barabási and Albert 1999)
  • Older actors in the network
  • New actors latch onto the ones already popular
• Implications for two-mode collaborative projects
  • The cumulative number of projects an actor collaborates on should increase at an increasing rate over time
  • The cumulative number of collaborators a project has should grow at an increasing rate

Homophily

• Similar actors tend to collaborate
• Similar projects tend to share the same actors
• Characteristics of similarity
  • Common age (actor) and period (project)
  • Gender (actor)
  • Shared geography (actor and project)
  • Creative aesthetics (actor)
  • Institutional affiliation (project)

First Order Closure

(Robins and Alexander 2004)

• Actors who have previously collaborated on a project likely continue the relationship
  • Basis for group identity on collaborative projects
  • Builds trust and reliability in project

First Order Closure

(Robins and Alexander 2004)

Lesser Discussed Explanation

Second Order Closure

(Opsahl 2013)

• Do I work with someone my collaborator has experience with, but I do not?
  • Yes
    • Short path length means quicker search (Granovetter 1974 weak ties)
    • Commonalities likely (i.e., cohesive subgroups)
  • No
    • My collaborator knows her, so I know of her, and if I wanted to work with her I would already be doing so with both her and my collaborator (Granovetter 1974 strong ties)
    • Shifts power balance (Bearman, Moody, and Stovel 2004)

Second Order Closure

?

Limitations of Projecting Two-Mode to One-Mode Networks

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Data

Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives

Metal Archives: Search Results

Metal Archives: Band Page

Metal Archives: Band Members

Metal Archives: Musician Page

Metal Archives: Album Page

Network Descriptives

• Size
  • Musicians, Recordings: 499,600, 258,922
  • Edges: 805,923 (density = 6.23e-06)
  • Largest component
    • Musicians, Recordings: 225,980, 132,568
    • Edges: 689,575
  • Mean Degree
    • Musician, Recording: 1.88, 3.64
• Age (min, 25%ile, med, 75%ile, max)
  • Musician birth: 1898, 1974, 1982, 1988, 2009
  • Album release: 1968, 2000, 2006, 2010, 2015
• Record labels: 22,942
• Nationalities: 160
• Females: 6%

To keep it manageable, we'll focus on three record labels

• Earache Records
  • Founded 1985, UK
  • Grindcore, death metal, thrash, and industrial metal
  • 323 releases (12th) and 892 musicians
• Candlelight Records
  • Founded 1993, UK
  • Black and death metal
  • 288 releases (14th) and 1288 musicians
• Season of Mist
  • Founded 1996, France
  • Black, pagan, death, avant-garde, and gothic metal
  • 260 releases (16th) and 1313 musicians

Findings

Preferential Attachment

Power Law Fit (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test)

• Musicians (degree >= 10): Earache Records, Season of Mist
• Recordings (degree >= 12): All

Measurement and Tests

• Local effects
  • Homophily: neighborhood of order 1
  • Closure: neighborhood of order 2, 4
• Measurements
  • Homophily
    • Blau index of diversity (categorical)
    • Standard deviation (continuous)
  • Closure
    • Robins and Alexander, 2004
    • Opsahl 2013
• Test: Wilcoxon Signed-Rank (paired)
  • Compare observed distributions to those from 1000 rewired graphs

Homophily, Country

Homophily, Age

Homophily, Gender

First Order Closure

Second Order Closure

Summary of Findings

• Preferential Attachment
  • Power law effects on the right tail
• Homophily
  • Very strong nationality and age effects
  • No gender effects
• Closure
  • First Order: very strong effects
  • Second Order
    • Not substantively different from chance for two of the three subgraphs
    • Greater among one subgraph, though not robust
• Consistency across subgraphs after controlling for size

Conclusions

• Collaboration forms ties between people and projects
  • People do not necessarily form a direct tie to one another
    • Neither do projects
  • Both people and their projects have some degree of agency
• Traditional tie formation explanations do hold when analyzed as a two-mode process
• Closure takes on a different character in two-mode networks
  • No definitive indication of weak ties in collaboration
  • Lengthy, careful search for collaborators is likely

Remaining Questions

• Do these findings hold for other types of music?
  • I.e., jazz, hip hop
• Do these findings exist in other forms of collaboration?
  • I.e., co-authorship
• Do these findings remain in multivariate analyses?

How common are closed five-paths?