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This paper introduces Reading Activity Traces (RATs) as a method for capturing and analyzing the creative processes involved in reading and interpreting media across interconnected sources. RATs aim to make visible the interpretive labor that often precedes and shapes creative work, which is increasingly automated by algorithms. The authors propose WikiRAT, a speculative instantiation on Wikipedia, to demonstrate the potential of RATs for reflective practice, reader modeling, and understanding the impact of automation on human interpretation.
Reading Activity Traces (RATs) reveal the hidden creative work lost when algorithms automate interpretation, offering a path to design AI that preserves human insight.
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.
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