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. 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.