1 Working Paper Decoding creativity and innovation through Visual Analytics: a textual analysis of British Columbia’s creative economy reports. Angèle Beausoleil, ISGP Phd Student, The University of British Columbia March 21, 2014 Abstract A creative economy is defined, classified and measured in numerous ways across cities, regions and nations. At its core, it concerns the design, development and distribution of creative and cultural products in global markets. Creativity and innovation are its key drivers and the most commonly used terms associated with successful economies. This paper attempts to describe British Columbia’s creative economy through the examination of how the terms “creativity” and “innovation” are expressed and connected inside 17 public reports, using an exploratory visual analytics process. Through scientific analysis of how British Columbians define their creative economy, social situation and perceptions of what others know, think and believe, we can empirically hypothesize a description. Visual analytics (VA) integrates computer processing with human perception in an interactive and visual processing of large data sets. With the aid of information visualizations, the analytics process of the aggregated reports (corpus) is explained and presented through text clouds, structures and maps of correlated words, phrases and themes. The study examines how “Many Eyes”, an open-source visual analytics tool, facilitated an exploratory semantic analysis of a data set and informed the creation of a hypothesis of BC’s Creative Economy. The corpus was segmented into four groups based on author-type: academic, government, industry and consultant. When comparing texts within each author-type group, the data visualizations presented patterns of consistent and similar themes. When comparing texts across the four author-groups, divergent themes and priorities emerged. The study concludes with a definition of BC’s Creative Economy and suggests the VA tool and process is a useful