Making Roman Scotland Come Alive: How Digital Stories Connect Museum Visitors with the Past

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This work represents a coming together of threads that have run throughout my career—digital technologies, visitor experience, and the question of how museums create meaningful connections with diverse publics. Leading the EMOTIVE project's Hunterian case study from 2016-2019 was both exhilarating and challenging, requiring me to bridge my roles as academic researcher and museum professional. Working with the brilliant team of Hilary Young (who I supervised as EMOTIVE Research Assistant, 2017-19) and Emilia Sosnowska (EMOTIVE Research Associate, 2018-19) was particularly rewarding. Hilary brought her background in public history and curatorial practice, while Emilia contributed expertise in interactive media art and multisensory participation. Beyond our Glasgow team, EMOTIVE involved an interdisciplinary consortium across Europe bringing together researchers and practitioners from archaeology, heritage interpretation, computer science, and creative industries. This diversity of perspectives was essential—the project required technical developers, heritage specialists, and creative storytellers to work in genuine partnership. Together we navigated the complex process of creating experiences that respected archaeological evidence while daring to imagine the emotional lives of people from the distant past. In late October 2019, we hosted a very successful demonstration at The Hunterian showcasing the completed EMOTIVE experiences. Then COVID hit. Just as we were celebrating what we'd achieved, the pandemic closed museums and transformed how we could engage visitors. But this turned into an unexpected opportunity. We applied EMOTIVE's lessons to the IDEA project at The Hunterian, funded by Museums Galleries Scotland, which allowed us to convert the EMOTIVE prototypes into accessible web-based resources that visitors could use on their own digital devices. What had been designed for museum-provided smartphones became adaptable for personal phones, tablets, and computers—making the experiences more sustainable and accessible long-term. The co-creative workshops were genuinely eye-opening. Watching primary school children engage with the Roman shoes display and spontaneously create the "If the shoe fits" story idea reminded me that emotional connection transcends age and expertise. Heritage isn't just for specialists—it belongs to everyone who engages with it. I'm particularly proud of the body mapping methodology we adapted from performance studies, specifically building on Professor Matthew Reason's work on capturing audience responses to theatre. Initially, some colleagues questioned whether visitors could articulate where they "felt" a museum experience in their bodies. But participants' responses were profound—marking their hearts and chests when describing Ebutius's dilemma, their heads when discussing Verecunda's identity struggles. These embodied reactions revealed dimensions of engagement that conventional questionnaires would have missed entirely. The EMOTIVE project was supported by EU Horizon 2020 funding (2016-19) and allowed me to explore questions I'm continuing to investigate through my British Academy/Wolfson Research Professorship (2022-26) on emotional engagement with museum collections through digital storytelling and participatory approaches. The Antonine Wall work laid crucial groundwork for understanding how digital technologies can enhance rather than replace physical encounters with cultural heritage. What stays with me most is a comment from one participant, an archaeologist, who wrote that Verecunda's story let them "engage in an emotional way" with objects they professionally analyse—discovering dimensions of the past they'd never accessed through scholarly methods alone. That encapsulates what this research is really about: expanding how we connect with heritage, not by abandoning rigour but by embracing the full range of human response to the past. Looking back, I see how this work built on my earlier research on museum websites and online collections while pointing toward my current work on participatory memory practices and immersive environments. The questions remain consistent: How do we create spaces—physical and digital—where people can construct personal meaning from cultural heritage? And how do we evaluate whether we're succeeding?

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