Evaluating emotional engagement in digital stories for interpreting the past. The case of the Hunterian Museum’s Antonine Wall EMOTIVE experiences

Abstract

Digital storytelling has been used in cultural heritage for over two decades, yet integrating this in museum displays to encourage visitors' deep engagement, including both affective and cognitive outcomes, remains challenging and raises a number of issues. EMOTIVE is a European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation project which addresses some of these as it aims to design and evaluate emotionally engaging digital visitor experiences for heritage sites and museum displays. The Hunterian, the museum of the University of Glasgow and one of the EMOTIVE cultural partners, has designed digital stories to interpret its permanent display 'The Antonine Wall: Rome's Final Frontier' which showcases the museum's collection from the Wall, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The paper discusses a) the design of the on-site EMOTIVE experience of 'Ebutius's Dilemma' based on the EMOTIVE conceptual framework, and b) the qualitative and quantitative, mixed-methods evaluation of the impact of the experience on diverse visitor groups, focusing primarily on emotional engagement, and based on the EMOTIVE evaluation framework. It presents formative evaluation findings, the lessons learned from using a variety of methods, and discusses the broader issues raised when designing for and studying emotional engagement in cultural heritage settings.

A Design Framework for Smart Glass Augmented Reality Experiences in Heritage Sites

“…Emotional responses to learning materials have been shown to increase motivation, attention, and facilitate effective learning (Wolfson and Case 2000;Taylor 2014;Zull and Statler 2016;Savenije and De Bruijn 2017), while heightened emotional involvement makes the learning content memorable and for longer periods of time than with emotionally neutral involvement (Ninaus et al 2019;McCrary 2002;Phelps 2004). Stories are powerful means of emotional engagement and the affective experience of learners through storytelling has been explored in online and multimedia learning environments (Mcquiggan, Robison and Lester 2008;McCrary 2002) and in heritage (Economou, Young and Sosnowska 2018;Savenije and De Bruijn 2017;Petrelli et al 2016).…”

Narralive – Creating and experiencing mobile digital storytelling in cultural heritage

“…The NSE has been one of the main authoring tools used in the course of the EMOTIVE project by the internal User Group of the EMOTIVE consortium and has resulted in the first prototype of the Hunterian Antonine Wall on-site experience, "The life of Ebutius", which was evaluated at the Scottish European Researchers' Night, Explorathon 2017 in the Hunterian Museum, on 29 September 2017 (Economou et al, 2019).…”

“…Since its first version in 2016, the NSE has been applied in a variety of contexts and used for the creation of 27 experiences in 16 museums and sites, as for example (Roussou et al, 2017), (Mirashrafi, 2017), (Katifori et al, 2019a), (Katifori et al, 2019b) and (Economou et al, 2019).…”

Digital Creativity and the Regional Museum: Experimental Collaboration at the Convergence of Immersive Media and Exhibition Design

“…In both cases, the research demonstrated that museums housed within historic buildings can be particularly well suited to the development of new media forms. Interactive and immersive media have often been used within archaeology and museums as a means of representing the past [13][8] [28][34]. This project demonstrated that as well as being used for depiction or representation, interactive and immersive media can also be used to mediate and to guide physical, intellectual and emotional engagements with the past.…”