Soliloquy: Fostering Poetry Comprehension Using an Interactive Think-aloud Visualization

Complex texts like poetry are distinct from informative texts, requiring additional subprocesses to decode and interpret. Approaching a poem without knowledge of these cognitive strategies can result in confusion and frustration—rather than comprehension. In this work, we explore how interfaces can surface and demonstrate these cognitive processes to novice readers. We introduce Soliloquy, an interface that visualizes the thoughts of an expert as they read and interpret a poem by using animations of text and pop-up tooltips. We evaluate the interface in a five-condition Mechanical Turk study (n=254) by varying the detail of thoughts, including audio, and substituting a static text control. Our study detected a significant difference in comprehension between the detail of thoughts, but not between the Soliloquy interface and static text control. We further investigate this finding in a think-aloud study (n=13), revealing the impact individual differences, experience, and cognitive load could have on Soliloquy’s effectiveness.