Chasing RATs: Tracing Reading for and as Creative Activity

TL;DR

This paper introduces Reading Activity Traces (RATs), a novel approach to treat reading as a form of creative activity, aiming to make interpretive processes visible and counteract automation's loss of human insight.

Contribution

It proposes RATs as a new method to trace and visualize reading as creative work, emphasizing interpretive labor often overlooked in creativity research.

Findings

RATs reveal the interpretive work behind reading activities.

WikiRAT demonstrates how RATs can be applied to Wikipedia.

The approach opens new avenues for reflective practice and collective sensemaking.

Abstract

Creativity research has privileged making over the interpretive labor that precedes and shapes it. We introduce Reading Activity Traces (RATs), a proposal that treats reading -- broadly defined to include navigating, interpreting, and curating media across interconnected sources -- as creative activity both for future artifacts and as a form of creation in its own right. By tracing trajectories of traversal, association, and reflection as inspectable artifacts, RATs render visible the creative work that algorithmic feeds and AI summarization increasingly compress and automate away. We illustrate this through WikiRAT, a speculative instantiation on Wikipedia, and open new ground for reflective practice, reader modeling, collective sensemaking, and understanding what is lost when human interpretation is automated -- towards designing intelligent tools that preserve it.