Crossing the horizon: exploring the adjacent possible in a cultural system

It is common opinion that many creative exploit are triggered by serendipity, fortuitous events leading to unintended consequences but this interpretation might simply be due to a poor understanding of the dynamics of creativity. Very little is known, in fact, about how innovations emerge and sample the space of potential novelties. This space is usually referred to as the adjacent possible, a concept originally introduced in the study of biological systems to indicate the set of possibilities that are one step away from what actually exists. In this paper we focus on the problem of portraying the adjacent possible space, and of analysing its dynamics, for a particular cultural system. We synthesised the graph emerging from the Internet Movies Database and looked at the static and dynamical properties of this network. We dealt with the subtle mechanism of the adjacent possible by measuring the expansion and the coverage of this elusive space during the global evolution of the system. We introduce the concept of adjacent possibilities at the level of single node to elucidate its nature by looking at the correlations with topological and user annotation metrics. We find that the exploration of the space of possibilities (potentially infinite by definition) shows a saturation size. Furthermore, single node analysis unveiled the importance of the adjacent possible as a useful probe for cultural impact. The Invisible Horizon from the Shoulders of Giants In a 1676 letter of Sir Isaac Newton can be found one of his most famous quotes: ”if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. With these words he meant to acknowledge and thank all the scholars that, with their efforts, made his work possible. The quote itself, actually, stems from at least four centuries before and was originally attributed to Bernard of Chartres. All cultural evolution processes strongly depend on the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. Each new outcome of a cultural system is influenced by prior outcomes, just like in a biological system each offspring is the result of replications, recombinations and/or mutations of its ancestors DNA. The dynamics of evolution and innovation in cultural systems represents a very hot cross-disciplinary topic, which attracted several efforts from the scientific community in recent years (Mayer 1998; Elgammal and Saleh 2015; Tria et al. 2014; Jordanous, Allington, and Dueck 2015). In particular, the topic has been tackled form several angles: for example, by trying to understand and quantify the unexpectedness of commercial products (Grace and Maher 2014), by analysing the balance between originality and generativity in the creative cooperative production of online communities (Hill and Monroy-Hernández 2012) or by studying user linguistics behaviours and innovations on the web (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2013). These efforts have been made possible by the unprecedented availability of data tracking influences in the cultural activity typical of the Information Age we live in. Innovation phenomena do not just depend on the shoulders one is standing on. Innovators stand on the edge separating the previous knowledge from what still remains to be discovered. There is a wide horizon of innovations reachable from the verge of what is already known and, after Kauffman (1996), we name it as “adjacent possible”. By definition the adjacent possible gets continuously reshaped at every step forward in the unknown. We can describe cultural innovation processes like explorations in the hypothetical network of cultural entities linked by their influences (Wang, Song, and Barabási 2013; Spitz and Horvát 2014; Mauch et al. 2015). Though the way in which these influences are combined to produce novel outcomes is currently under the attention of scientists, very few attempts have been done, to the best of our knowledge, to analyse the way in which cultural network are explored so that the very notion of adjacent possible in cultural systems remains largely unexplored. Several question arise around this fascinating concept. How creative solutions do explore the adjacent possible frontiers? Do exploration patterns have long time lasting influence in the cultural network? Can this mechanism be improved to foster the insurgence of creative exploits? And, if so, how? In which way the creative exploration path covered in the past does influence future steps? Shedding some light on these questions could strongly improve our understanding of creativity and innovations both at an individual and at a societal level. This paper takes these lines of investigations by focusing on the the cultural system behind the cinematographic production. We adopted in particular a Web dataset of cinematographic production to reconstruct the network of influences among motion picture films. This network has been