In the summer of 2011, I worked with Julie Johnstone of the Scottish Poetry Library to stage an exhibition of work and research produced by the Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition project. At the same time, I worked with project colleagues and programmers to develop and built a digital Archive of Reading to be housed at the SPL and launched during the exhibition.

The Archive of Reading is a public resource, making accessible the experimental results gathered during the Poetry Beyond Text Project. It is housed at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The archive was launched as part of the Poetry Beyond Text exhibition, held at the Scottish Poetry Library between May 14th 2011 and July 17th 2011.

The potential for an Archive of Reading was identified during the experimental phases of the Poetry Beyond Text project. For, while multiple, vast archives of writing exist, including records of ‘readings’, in the sense of writing that responds to, evaluates, or interprets texts, the act of reading – the cognitive, emotive and physical processes which occur while an individual is engaged with a text – remains largely ephemeral and hard to document. A crucial element of ‘Poetry Beyond Text’ has been the capture of elements of that process: we have shown that a reading performed (silently or otherwise) by an ‘audience member’ can be as unique and as interesting as one performed by a poet.

This project began from the premise that although there are multiple, vast and disparate archives of writing, the actual process of reading – the cognitive, emotive and physical process which occur while an individual is engaged in reading a text – remains largely ephemeral and hard to document. The archive holds readings of various forms, from eye-tracking records to creative visual responses.

The image used here featured a work created by Kathleen Renwick as part of the Poetry Beyond Text Project.