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About

Katherine O’Toole

I am a PhD student in Northwestern University’s Technology and Social Behavior program, and work with Agnes Horvat in the LINK lab.

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Research

In my research, I investigate creativity as an interactive, emergent phenomenon that is embedded in the larger socio-cultural context, and explore how technological affordances can facilitate creativity for both individuals and groups. By drawing on the conceptual framework of creativity as a form of enactive cognition, my research aims to develop computational models of the processes involved in collective creativity and cultural evolution in order to shed light on the underlying cognitive processes required to generate new ideas. My work focuses on the intersection of human behavior and technology in creative domains, and understanding how technology can be leveraged to support creativity both in individual and collaborative settings. I utilize big data analysis, social network science, machine learning, statistical modeling, and other computational methods to study human behavior and interactions in the context of creativity and collaborative innovation, with a particular focus on music. I am particularly interested in examining the dynamics of co-creative behaviors within socio-technical systems, and my work leverages digital trace data to investigate how distributed creativity emerges as individuals extend and build on existing knowledge within a domain.

Publications

In my latest paper, Extending Human Creativity with AI, published in the Journal of Creativity, I examine how AI technologies can be leveraged to support human creativity, particularly through the development of new creative practices and forms of expression.

My paper, Collaborative Creativity in TikTok Duets was published in the Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. In this paper, I explore how the technical affordances of the Duet feature structure collaborative interactions between musicians on the TikTok platform and shape the development of a distributed creative process.

Novelty and Cultural Evolution in Modern Popular Music, is available to read in EPJ Data Science. In this paper, I use computational methodologies to measure novelty in the aural and lyrical attributes of songs, and examine relationships between song novelty and the likelihood of commercial success.

Contact

kmarie.otoole@gmail.com KatherineOaposToole2020@u.northwestern.edu