Chasing RATs: Tracing Reading for and as Creative Activity
This addresses the problem of automated compression of human interpretation in media consumption for researchers and designers, offering a foundational shift but with speculative implementation.
The paper tackles the undervaluation of interpretive labor in creativity research by proposing Reading Activity Traces (RATs) to treat reading as creative activity, illustrating it with WikiRAT on Wikipedia to make creative work visible and open new research directions.
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.