Chasing RATs: Tracing Reading for and as Creative Activity

2026-03-11

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevailing overemphasis on content generation in contemporary intelligent systems, which often neglects reading as a creative activity and thereby compresses human processes of interpretation and synthesis. The work proposes the concept of “Reading Activity Trajectories” (RATs), reconceptualizing reading in its broadest sense as an autonomous creative practice. By tracking users’ pathways of browsing, associating, and reflecting across multimodal sources, RATs render these interpretive processes inspectable as tangible artifacts of creation. Leveraging trajectory tracking, human-computer interaction design, and speculative prototyping, the authors implement WikiRAT—a proof-of-concept system deployed on Wikipedia. This research opens new avenues for reflective reading, reader modeling, and collective meaning-making, exposes the cognitive losses incurred by automated interpretation, and offers design principles for intelligence-augmenting tools that preserve and amplify human hermeneutic agency.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Explainable and interpretable methods for personalization

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.

Problem

• creativity
• reading
• interpretation
• automation
• algorithmic feeds

Innovation

• Reading Activity Traces
• creative interpretation
• algorithmic automation
• reflective practice
• human-AI collaboration