Chasing RATs: Tracing Reading for and as Creative Activity

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.

Agency Among Agents: Designing with Hypertextual Friction in the Algorithmic Web

Today's algorithm-driven interfaces, from recommendation feeds to GenAI tools, often prioritize engagement and efficiency at the expense of user agency. As systems take on more decision-making, users have less control over what they see and how meaning or relationships between content are constructed. This paper introduces "Hypertextual Friction," a conceptual design stance that repositions classical hypertext principles--friction, traceability, and structure--as actionable values for reclaiming agency in algorithmically mediated environments. Through a comparative analysis of real-world interfaces--Wikipedia vs. Instagram Explore, and Are.na vs. GenAI image tools--we examine how different systems structure user experience, navigation, and authorship. We show that hypertext systems emphasize provenance, associative thinking, and user-driven meaning-making, while algorithmic systems tend to obscure process and flatten participation. We contribute: (1) a comparative analysis of how interface structures shape agency in user-driven versus agent-driven systems, and (2) a conceptual stance that offers hypertextual values as design commitments for reclaiming agency in an increasingly algorithmic web.