A methodological essay on the application of social sequence analysis to the study of creative trajectories

We illustrate the contribution of Social Sequence Analysis to the study of temporal patterns of creativity by examining stylistic variation sequences in the underground electronic music field. To foster a better understanding of the application of this methodological framework, we demonstrate its use through a worked example. We first discuss the stylistic trajectories of two worldwide acclaimed electronic music artists: Paul Kalkbrenner (Germany) and Four Tet (UK). We then extend the sample and use a dataset composed of the first 10 records published by 579 artists in the same music genre. Using these examples, we demonstrate how sequence methods can be leveraged to represent and analyze temporal dynamics of style in a way that other traditional analytical approaches (e.g., event history or panel design methods) cannot.