A thorough thematic analysis of literature was conducted in order to ascertain re-occurring themes across relevant research on creativity, collaboration, and supporting technology. The goal was to identify common themes across a wide range of research, in order to explore the importance of these themes within the more specific context of greater technological support of creative collaboration.

Themes were identified based on their prevalence across all the literature reviewed. Initially an attempt was made to identify themes and patterns within each data item (research paper). This provided a higher degree of detail then was useful, or practical, given the scope of the project.

To help facilitate the identification of themes, affinity diagramming and card sorting was used to generate the theme titles and to determine potential relevance and hierarchy. This proved a valuable way of narrowing down the number of themes and also establishing which themes were potentially related to each other (directly or indirectly).