Nestled within the Canongate Tollbooth in Edinburgh, the People’s Story Museum is home to a fascinating collection of memories and snapshots of working-class life over the past
300 years.
For my dissertation, I focused on emotion as a way of gaining deeper, richer insights on how museums move people.
The concept of the “emotional turn” is about moving away from the idea that humans always act as purely rational beings. Instead, it views emotion as a lens for understanding how we think, behave and respond. Although the emotional turn has become a familiar term, its meaning is often blurred with affect, feeling and response. But emotion is very useful for researching how people describe their experiences in the museum, and how this compares with the emotions staff expect visitors to have.
I explored this through interviews, exhibition analysis and emotional mapping. The exhibition analysis considered the museum’s layout, design, objects and atmosphere, identifying anticipated “emotional hotspots” where visitors felt most moved. This drew on informal observation of the museum, alongside my own experience as a visitor and member of staff.
This became an emotional “heat map”, showing where different experiences converged, diverged and overlapped. My findings revealed a clear gap between staff expectations and visitors’ actual experiences. Although the responses of visitors varied, emotion remained the common thread running through their descriptions of what they experienced and remembered.
I hope this research encourages further attention to emotional responses among visitors in museums. Emotions are fluid, shifting across people, places and moments. Museums are places where people feel moved, so let us shift the way in which we talk, think and feel about visitor experiences. Objects, people and their connecting stories will all be richer for it.
Natalia Williams is a freelance curator and cultural heritage professional based in Edinburgh. The intersections between history, art and daily life thread through her work. Get in touch with your thoughts at hello@nataliawilliams.co.uk
