Pauline Mackay

Co-Investigator: Museums in the Metaverse

University of Glasgow

Speaker Biography

Dr Pauline Mackay is Director of the Queen’s Anniversary Prize-winning Centre for Robert Burns Studies and Head of Subject for Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is Arts Representative on the University’s XR Project Board.

Pauline is currently Co-Investigator on the Innovate UK Levelling-Up Innovation Accelerator project ‘Museums in the Metaverse’ to develop a ground-breaking, two-sided XR (Extended Reality) platform for Cultural Heritage. Pauline co-leads the Museology work package to: refine the curation of XR-enabled assets for public engagement; develop metadata and cataloguing standards to enable users to effectively locate, understand and interact with cultural assets; and support development and testing of the platform’s bespoke functionality for the Cultural Heritage sector and its audiences.

Since 2021 Pauline has collaborated with immersive learning platform Edify to develop the first ever Robert Burns (1759-1796) Virtual Reality experience. Burns Beyond Reality is a cross-disciplinary immersive learning experience designed to elucidate the relationship between literature, location, material culture and the composition of ‘sites of memory’. In 2023 Pauline was awarded the English Association’s Fellows Award for her use of XR technology in research and teaching, to explore and illuminate literary legacy and cultural commemoration.

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