Literary Memory & VR: Burns Beyond Reality
This presentation charts the creation of ‘Burns Beyond Reality’: the first ever Robert Burns-inspired Virtual Reality ‘classroom’, produced in collaboration with new Immersive Learning Platform, Edify. This development is considered in the wider context of research projects and publications produced over the course of the last decade to chart Burns’s phenomenal global commemoration ‘Beyond Text’, taking into account also the recommendations of The Scottish Heritage Partnership Immersive Experiences Policy Report (Pittock, 2018). I will demonstrate the ways in which ‘VR superpowers’ can be deployed to illuminate Burns’s literary and cultural memory for University students, the general public, and consumers of Culture & Heritage, and point to future research on the use of virtual and augmented reality for the composition and curation of literary memory in the twenty-first century.
Pauline Mackay, University of Glasgow, Scotland