In this episode of Skip the Queue, we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way heritage stories are told and experienced. Joining us is Dominique Bouchard, Heritage and Engagement Director at Leeds Castle and soon-to-be Creative Director at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. We discuss the role of AI in visitor attractions, the development of the world’s first interactive historical avatar, and what this means for the future of heritage storytelling.
In this episode of Skip the Queue, Andy Povey is joined by Dominique Bouchard, Heritage and Engagement Director at Leeds Castle and incoming Creative Director at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming heritage storytelling. They discuss the creation of the world’s first interactive historical AI avatar, how Leeds Castle brought Queen Eleanor of Castile to life, and what this innovation means for the future of visitor engagement across heritage attractions.
Topics Discussed:
Show references:
Dr Dominique Bouchard, Heritage and Engagement Director at Leeds Castle. Soon-to-be Creative Director at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Pilgrimage of Love: Eleanor of Castile
Museum and Heritage show at Olympia London, Theatre 3 at 2:15 on Wednesday 13th May, 2026
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Credits:
Written by Emily Burrows (Plaster)
Edited by Steve Folland
Produced by Emily Burrows and Sami Entwistle (Plaster)
Dominique Bouchard: It's not often that a heritage organisation gets to be on the leading edge of some kind of global interactive technologies.
Andy Povey: In this episode of Skip the Queue, we discuss the role of AI in visitor attractions and the development of the world's first interactive historical avatar.
Dominique Bouchard: You couldn't provide enough training or script or content to allow a costumed human to answer any question, whatever. This technology is the only way you can do it.
Andy Povey: Joining us is Dominique Bouchard, Heritage and Engagement Director at Leeds Castle.
Dominique Bouchard: People are very used to AIs being a little bit servile. You know, ChatGPT falls over itself to tell you how wonderful you are. And we felt that she was a mediaeval queen. She was kind of a badass. She needed to have a personality, you know, the sort of personality that somebody like her would have had to have. She's rude.
Andy Povey: We explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way heritage stories are told and.
Dominique Bouchard: Experienced experimental technology that you don't know if your audiences are going to love or hate is a pretty gutsy thing to do.
Andy Povey: I'm your host, Andy Povey. Welcome to Skip the Queue, the podcast for people working in and with visitor attractions. Brought to you by Merac.
Dominique Bouchard: Leeds Castle is a 900 year old amazing castle which is situated on two little islands in the River Len in beautiful Kent. It's in a kind of dip in the landscape. And so the view of the castle and the. The vistas around it are really as beautiful as they get. The. The castle has its origins in the Anglo-Saxon period, where it gets its name from. So there's an Anglo-Saxon called Leed, and it was his castle or his fort, so that's persisted. And it underwent a series of transformations following the Norman Conquest.
Dominique Bouchard: It was in the ownership of one of the soldiers, Norman soldiers, who was very loyal to William the Conqueror and then passed down through the generations until it came into the possession of Eleanor of Castile, who was the Queen of England and the wife of Edward I. And that really begins Leeds Castle's overarching storey, which is a castle that has been owned by six mediaeval queens, which is pretty extraordinary. And over the last 900 years, it's undergone a series of interventions and changes and it probably wouldn't have been recognisable to Eleanor of Castile so much even today, and definitely got changed out of all order. If you went back to the Anglo Saxon lead to ask him what he thought.
Dominique Bouchard: So those big interventions have transformed the castle, but it's always been a place of luxury, of retreat and of rest. So it's unlike most other castles in Britain, probably most similar to Kenilworth Castle in that it was a sign or a residence for enjoyment and for relaxation, rather than a fortification intended to be a strategic defence position or a strategic offence position.
Andy Povey: Interesting. And I mean, it's been a while since I've been to Leeds Castle, but I fully concur with the place of relaxation and luxury. Absolutely fantastic venue. Before we dive into the detail, quick icebreaker question. What's the most unusual or surprising place you've ever visited?
Dominique Bouchard: Gosh, I wasn't expecting that question. That's a good one. I guess the place that I visited that has probably had one of the most profound influences on me. I was an undergraduate in New York and I was actually studying applied physics and mathematics and I thought I was going to go off to become a physicist or something ridiculous like that. And I was on holiday in Greece and this island that, you know, according to the tour guide, was the island where the Cyclops was and where Odysseus and his men escaped from the Cyclops on the underbelly of some very specific goats.
Dominique Bouchard: And I was standing in this cave, kind of surrounded by bits of ceramic and looking out over the Aegean and I thought to myself, I'm not really sure I want to spend all my time in a lab. And that was the place where I decided I was going to become an archaeologist and then followed my hare-brained scheme to do my PhD and pursue my career in museums. So I guess that's kind of a weird. Definitely a weird place. A place of really deep mythology and very exciting. But I guess like most, like many heritage sites, the story is, you know, you don't often let a good storey get in the way of the truth. So I'm not quite sure whether it's the actual Cyclops cave.
Dominique Bouchard: There were certainly no one eyed monsters in there, but it was a. It was a place that had a lot of meaning for me and someplace very interesting and a bit different.
Andy Povey: It must be fantastic to be able to pin down the start of your career to a specific moment, a specific place like that. So the project we're here to talk about, and I saw you present about this at the Experience UK conference a few weeks ago and I was absolutely blown away. Absolutely fascinating. At Leeds Castle, you've recently introduced one of the first, definitely UK first. Is it a world first? I don't know.
Dominique Bouchard: I'm told that it's a world first. Nobody's told us yet that they've got one that opened before the 2nd of March, so, you know, we'll claim the title. It's not often that a heritage organisation gets to be on the leading edge of some kind of global interactive technology. So I think we'll take it.
Andy Povey: Absolutely. So the world's first interactive historical AI avatar. Well, is it an avatar of? Is the avatar actually Queen Elena of Castile?
Dominique Bouchard: It isn't what I want to clarify. I think it's important to clarify what is AI and what isn't, and also what's unique about it. So we'll come to the bit that's really tremendously unique, because people have chatbots that they've. They've talked to and things like that, and the AI Eleanor that you encounter in the chapel in Leeds Castle, and it's part of a conventional exhibition on Eleanor of Castile and her relationship and influence on Britain more broadly, but Leeds Castle in particular. So you encounter this AI as the culmination at the end of the exhibition.
Dominique Bouchard: And like I said, the exhibition's pretty conventional in the sense that it's panels, text, lots of very rigorously researched information that we're giving people, and some really wonderful illustrations that we commissioned as well, to help people connect with the storey of Eleanor. So when you go into the final room, which we've called an audience with the Queen, and it is really an audience, you go in and take a seat and we have the pews in the chapel sort of arranged in such a way that Eleanor is at the front of the room and she's commanding everybody's attention. It's a wonderful, incredible 3D digital image of Eleanor, of what we feel is. It's not a reconstruction, but a reimagination of Eleanor of Castile.
Dominique Bouchard: And to produce it, we, our own curatorial team worked with textile experts at The V&A 3D artists, other kinds of historians, to come up with the look and feel of this person, down to the nature of the fabric that would have been worn, the colours of the fabric that would have been worn, all the patterns that are most likely to be on that fabric. And artists and historians work together to produce the visual that you see. So none of the visual was actually created by AI. The only AI element of the Eleanor of Castile is how the avatar formulates answers to the questions that visitors ask. So the voice is provided by a voice actor.
Dominique Bouchard: The visual that you see is produced by artists who work for SKC Studios and 1956 individuals, alongside our own internal experts and experts in the sector. So we're calling it an AI. But actually the AI bit is the bit that formulates the answers to your questions rather than the entire digital thing that you're interacting with.
Andy Povey: That makes absolute sense. It's really clear. So you've got effectively the machine that's been created by humans and then the AI that drives.
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah, exactly. The chassis is all made by people, by artists. And how people choose to use it is determined by them. But the answers get essentially formulated based on factual information that we've provided. And also then it just goes to the wider Internet. What's particularly interesting and what's particularly unique about this avatar is that it is environmentally aware. So you could have a chatbot, essentially, with a digital skin on it to make it look like a person. And people type in, or they have to push a button to speak or something like that, and then it responds. The avatar that we've got or the interactive that we have, we direct people where they need to stand.
Dominique Bouchard: But when they're standing in this place, the avatar, there's a camera there, identifies that a person is standing there. Then you can prompt it. There's a trigger phrase. Now we decided to introduce a trigger phrase for it, like, you know, hey, Siri, or whatever, Alexa, or whatever you say, greetings, Queen Eleanor. Otherwise, it responds to whatever it hears in the room, as long as there's somebody in the room. And we thought we needed people to be able to have private conversations without having Eleanor of Castile weigh in on what they're gonna have for dinner. Yeah, it's been in a really thought provoking process to go through because you have.
Dominique Bouchard: You start asking yourself all kinds of questions that you didn't know that you were gonna have to make decisions about, you know, that like whether were gonna have a prompt or whether you just walk into the room and when. And when the camera registers there's a person there, you know, you're. You're on with the queen. And so those sorts of things, I think, are, you know, excited.
Andy Povey: This isn't necessarily a technology project. There's a whole load of other questions that are nothing to do with the technology.
Dominique Bouchard: Well, exactly. I mean, with, you know, in museum interpretation and crafting experiences and curating experiences for visitors, museum professionals have been for, you know, years and years thinking about how best to encourage people to encounter things. So we think about how people learn. We think about, just like you make an album, like a music album, and you've got your fast tracks and your soft tracks, and you kind of bring people on a journey, an interpretation project or an Exhibition is the same thing. And when the technology becomes the end in itself, then it doesn't work and people get pretty fed up with it because it's not really about their experience, it's about the organisation showing off how cool it is that it's got this neat bit of kit. And so everybody's tolerance level for that's really low.
Dominique Bouchard: So if that was our starting position was that the technology had to work well enough that it needed to offer something that no other existing approach to museum or heritage interpretation could offer. And having an AI that can answer any question in real time and be environmentally aware, that ticked those boxes. Museums have been long, for a long time, heritage organisations have been hiring costumed interpreters to give people that sense of interactivity. That's not an option for this kind of approach because you couldn't provide enough training or script or content to allow that accostumed human to answer any question whatever. You might get that if you had a Eleanor of Castile historian dressed up in some kind of a frock. But that's not going to work because. Because they can't answer every question on any topic.
Dominique Bouchard: So to be able to do that, this technology is the only way you can do it. If you want questions answered in real time, then this is it. If you want to restrict the number of questions or the kinds of questions that visitors can ask, yes, then you can have a human because you can give your actor a script to work off of. But if they're not working off a script, then that's that.
Andy Povey: We'll come on to the technology in a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit more about Queen Eleanor herself? What was her impact on the country as well as on these castles?
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah, she's sort of one of the most important queens of England who you kind of don't really hear very much about. So just to give everybody a sense of when we're talking about. She was born in about 1241 and she died in 1290. And we know quite a lot about her death because her husband, who was King Edward I, was so totally devastated by her loss that in repatriating her body to London, it was a 12 day journey because they were up by Lincoln. And after she was buried he had giant monumental crosses that we know as the Eleanor crosses. So you might not have heard of Eleanor of Castile, but you probably heard of an Eleanor cross. Charon Cross is probably the most famous one that got torn down, I believe, during the Civil War.
Dominique Bouchard: But there are 12 monumental crosses that he had Built at each of the places where they stayed overnight on the way, bringing her body back to London. And that kind of tells you what you need to know about their relationship. It was a profound relationship. They were married when they were both pretty much children. I think she was 13 and he was 14 or 15. Very creepy nowadays. Fairly common then, but at least the age gap wasn't, you know, wasn't vast. And she and he worked very closely together to build up the. The English, the throne's coffers to quell political unrest. They went on crusade together and she really travelled everywhere with him. So they were constantly on the go at the point when he becomes king. The kind of.
Dominique Bouchard: The Crown estate is not particularly wealthy. There's lots and lots of years of warfare that have drained the resources. And she was really instrumental as a very astute businesswoman in building up those resources. So she was wealthy in her own right and was probably the wealthiest. One of the wealthiest people forget about women, just people in England at the time. And was responsible also then for infusing the English court with the kind of cultural vibrance and excitement that we think of when we think of the early English court. So I think she was really responsible for this transition of the English court from this kind of very almost militaristic chief king approach that you had before him to one where the king was. And the court was a place of culture, of music.
Dominique Bouchard: She had a scriptorium where she commissioned books to be written and copied. She and Edward promoted this image of themselves and their court as a kind of contemporary Camelot all the way through to the extent that they performed a ceremony where they pretended to rebury the bones of Arthur and Guinevere.
Andy Povey: Wow.
Dominique Bouchard: So this idea of themselves as a kind of NER court, as a modern Camelot, even though we're Talking about the 13th century, it was really important to them and very an essential part of their identity. And that was. Historians think. Our lead curator certainly thinks, and I'm a believer, that Eleanor was a real driving force behind that. You know, imagine you're 13 years old, right? You're a 13 year old girl, you've grown up in this incredible court in Spain, surrounded by this amazing architecture, all infused by the kind of the Islamic architecture of the previous centuries. Literature, music, the weather's pretty good fruit, all this. Then you pitch up in England and your husband's been fighting like his whole life, as has everyone in his family.
Dominique Bouchard: Everything's kind of covered in mud and there are these big cold castles. I think she Sort of felt like something needed to be done for the English court to be able to.
Andy Povey: I was gonna say, you're not selling it very well at that point.
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah, you need to be able to participate in a kind of European courtly culture. And she really elevated the English court to that kind of a situation.
Andy Povey: So the moderniser of her time.
Dominique Bouchard: Moderniser and a tremendous cultural influence.
Andy Povey: She was obviously the right person to bring to life. So now let's talk about how do you actually manage the delivery of answering questions? You said earlier that using AI means the Queen Elena can answer any question.
Dominique Bouchard: You can ask her anything somebody asked her about when a particular actress started on Kori. I can see a transcript of all of the questions that have been asked and answered. There are more than 20,000 questions I've been asked since the beginning of March when the exhibition opened, which is incredible. And actually I've got one of the questions recently. I just need to look it up. I can't use the exact language that the questioner used. So the question was, why did Crystal palace blank yesterday? And Eleanor said, I'm afraid sporting matters and recent events like those at Crystal palace are far removed from my realm and my concern. If you have questions about my time or influence, make them swift. So you can ask her about.
Dominique Bouchard: She won't answer everything, you know, she won't give you a football commentary on Crystal Palace's performance a few weeks ago or her hopes for Arsenal. But what she will do is engage with what you're talking about and the broader areas. So, you know, the AI knows that it's about sport.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah. For example, Dominique, you've just made me. In my mind. I've now gone to the meeting room at Leeds Castle where this was all being discussed. And how did you work out how you were going to deal with those kind of contemporary questions?
Dominique Bouchard: Well, this is one of the key decisions we made. So we decided not to hide or pretend that it is. That it's an. That it's an AI. So, for example, one of the decisions we could have taken was, should the AI know something after Eleanor's death?
Andy Povey: Yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: You know, Eleanor of Castile wouldn't theoretically know anything that happened after she died, because she was dead. Yeah, we thought that was going to be pretty boring and be really restrictive for visitors. So if this AI was being used in a conference about the. About Eleanor of Castile's life, we might made a difference decision. But thinking about our audiences, and we really try to be audience led, audience driven here, people are gonna have questions and they don't know that people, most people don't, aren't gonna think about, oh, did this happen before Eleanor died or after? So we thought, okay, let's not pretend this is a kind of resurrection. This is a computer, it's a computer programme.
Dominique Bouchard: Let's let it know that it's an AI and let's let it therefore answer questions beyond the knowledge base or outside of the knowledge of this individual from the 13th century. And so that was one of those key, you know, decisions where, you know, where we could have gone in a different direction. But we, but we felt that for this person that we're talking about and for this audience, that was the right decision and everything we kind of took from there. We didn't have any models that we could look to base our decision. So it was really all about the experiences that we have as professionals in the area. And, you know, you do your best and like what my wife says, sometimes you make the right decision and sometimes you make the decision. Right.
Dominique Bouchard: My father says something similar, but he's a little more uncouth.
Andy Povey: The response that you just read out, I picked up from that the AI doesn't really have a lot of patience for questions.
Dominique Bouchard: No, she's rude. That was another thing that we decided. We wanted her to have a personality. People are very used to AIs being a little bit servile. So, you know, ChatGPT falls over itself to tell you how wonderful you are. And we felt that she was a mediaeval queen. She was kind of a badass. She needed to have a personality that was, you know, the sort of nonsense personality that somebody like her would have had to have. You know, there's this story about Eleanor of Castile. It's not true, but it gives you an insight into the way people thought about her at the time that she was alive. So when she and Edward went on the Ninth Crusade, apparently there was an assassination attempt on his life, which is true.
Dominique Bouchard: And then it gets a bit makey uppy. It said that he was shot with a poison arrow or something, or a poison dagger, and she sucked the poison out of his wound, thus saving his life. Right. That's not a story you tell about a shrinking violet. That's the story of somebody who is, you know, full on, who is fearless, who is intense, who is brave and who is willing to do whatever it takes to resolve whatever the crisis is. And so that storey and that element of her personality and that legend about her came up with it was sort of, I don't know if it was within her lifetime, but it's been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Dominique Bouchard: Although we don't have anything that Eleanor actually wrote, and we do know she was literate, by the way, we can take this picture that emerges from her, from the things around her, from what we know about her travels. I mean, she went on crusade, she gave birth on crusade. She was pregnant 17 times.
Andy Povey: 17. That's not a lot of time left to do much else.
Dominique Bouchard: I could barely walk up the stairs when I was pregnant. The idea of travelling across Europe on a horse is just like, you know, they went all the whales, they went there, they went everywhere, they were all over the place all the time. She had 17 kids, only six of them made it to adulthood. This is a person who has experienced the world, who had to be an adult from a very young age, who is intelligent, who. Who was astute, who had suffered loss and grief and, you know, and we wanted all of that richness of her experience to come through her personality, not as some kind of shrinking violet, servile queen. AI that tells you, oh, yes, that's your football team is wonderful. Aren't you wonderful?
Dominique Bouchard: But rather, actually, she doesn't have time for your BS questions about Crystal Palace. She's got real stuff going on.
Andy Povey: I would have loved to have been in that room when all of these conversations and these decisions were being made. It's such a playful experience.
Dominique Bouchard: My feeling is that visitors are smart. They know what they're interested, they know what they're not interested in. And, you know, the downside of a conventional exhibition is that you can only write and print the text once, and you can take all of the insights and everything that you know about your audiences and what people want. You can do all kinds of research to make sure that you're answering the questions that you anticipate people will ask. And, you know, part of my job is to know that stuff, right? In addition to being a historian, I need to know about how it all works.
Dominique Bouchard: People interpretation specialise in how to tell storeys in a 3D environment, but with this kind of an AI, and particularly with an individual that you don't know what people are going to latch onto as an interesting tidbit about them, because they're not a famous person or not as famous as somebody like Henry VIII or Catherine of Aragon, who's the subject of the next exhibition we'll be doing. So the freedom that a responsive AI gives you is the freedom that then you can just pass whole hog onto your visitors and we can decide how narrow or how wide we want that freedom to be. And we decided in this instance that were going to let it. We're just going to open it up.
Andy Povey: What's the audience response been like?
Dominique Bouchard: People are a bit scared of her. We've had some children be a little scared, We've had some adults be a little intimidated. That's okay. Not everybody wants to ask her a question once they've seen how rude she can be and tells people to jog on when they've had their three questions. People are amazed. Some people really just like looking at it because it is visually incredibly impressive and arresting.
Andy Povey: Yes.
Dominique Bouchard: The television screen that we've got this thing on is the largest TV screen I've ever seen in my whole life. And it needs like a special mount and a special everything to get it to have it standing up. And it is visually beautiful because the artist, the art director, is a guy called Jason Wilson at 1956 individuals SKC Studios, and he works so closely with our lead curator on this. You know that when you get close to the screen, there's even more detail in the visual that you can see down to the fabric there almost little stray threads coming off the cloak. In some places, the inside of her cloak is lined with squirrel tails, because that's what you would have done. It feels rich and it feels deep and that.
Dominique Bouchard: That we also wanted the. Just the experience of standing in front of this thing to be interesting and educative and beautiful. And that's what. That's what they've been, that's what they've done. And, you know, there. I talk about Jason's work in terms of crafting this model and the clothing and all the drapery and everything. But there were sound artists and light artists who specialised to make sure the light coming onto her face within the screen matches the lighting in the room. So when nobody's talking to the III and it's sort of just standing there, it looks out idly out the window. You know, the idea is it's really located within this space. And that was really important to us as well. We didn't.
Dominique Bouchard: We wanted it to feel like it made sense in the space. And behind. In the. In that room, there is a. There's a 16th century tapestry on the wall and they. That tapestry was scanned and then put into the screen. So when you're looking at Eleanor, the background is the tapestry. It's not 100% matched up, but. But it feels grounded in that Space. It feels authentic in that space, even though it couldn't be any less authentic because it's television screen with an AI in. Well, in, we say the chapel. The chapel was a music room in the 1930s, so it's gone through a series of changes. Anyway,.
Andy Povey: We've had you made some comments about individual audience expectation. What's the general feeling been? Has it been well received?
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah, it's been really well received. I mean, this is a big risk, right? You know, there's a reason why heritage organisations aren't often at the leading edge of technology, is that we don't have a lot of money. We need to be very careful and very cautious about how we spend our money. And exhibitions are really expensive anyway, so the idea of spending a certain portion of your exhibition budget on an experimental, essentially experimental, technology that you don't know if your audiences are going to love or hate is a pretty gutsy thing to do. And, you know, it was a gamble. And we felt really, we felt like we're going to embrace the opportunity. So I think that for us, there's all of this pressure on heritage organisations and museums to do exciting, immersive things.
Dominique Bouchard: A lot of that can feel really surface and really gimmicky. I think what we felt the difference was with this was that it really does the thing that heritage organisations and museums talk about doing all the time, which is putting the visitor in the driver's seat and giving people ownership and agency over their visit, blah, blah. People talk about doing that, but how you achieve it is there's no one way, there's no one formula, and, you know, you can only kind of scrape at it most of the time, at the best of times. And so when this. This technology provided that opportunity, we thought, well, if it's terrible, then we can close the door.
Andy Povey: It's a software programme, isn't it?
Dominique Bouchard: You can rewrite it, but yeah, but it worked. I think were, because we allowed the AI to scrape its information from the Internet to answer questions that gave it a range and a kind of human quality that wouldn't have been achieved otherwise. So there's a way of doing it where you do something called a walled garden content, which means that the AI, somebody asks a question and it dips into this bank of information to answer the questions. And if the information isn't there, then it can't answer the question.
Dominique Bouchard: With Eleanor of Castile, we felt that the bank of information that was available on the Internet, because she's not the most popular person, was actually meant that the Quality of the information out there is actually kind of pretty good for somebody who's more famous, where there's a lot more controversy, because AIs and LLMs are stochastic models. When you've got something, there's a lot of content, the quality is really variable and AI can't tell you what's high quality and what's low quality. It just tells you what this most popular. Right. So. So we felt that for somebody else who is much more famous, actually, that might not be the right way to go because the quality of the answers might be pretty poor.
Andy Povey: Yeah, well, you're giving up a load of control, a load of curatorial control.
Dominique Bouchard: As historians, we're not good at that.
Andy Povey: As curators, that's going to be really difficult.
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah. But, you know, but we didn't want somebody to stand in front of Eleanor of Castile, this AI, and say, what's your favourite colour? And she's like, I don't know.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: We don't know what Eleanor of Castile's favourite colour is, but we felt really clear that the AI needed to give people answer because she's a person and people have favourite colours. Even people who lived 700 years ago had a favourite colour.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: So we decided that the. The risk, the historical harm that was going to be done by her saying my favourite colour is blue or my favourite colour is red or whatever was much lower than the benefit of creating an opportunity for people to connect very closely, very deeply with a figure from the past through a heritage experience.
Andy Povey: That makes total sense. I love it.
Dominique Bouchard: I might make a different decision tomorrow for a different individual in a different context and different organisation. And so I think what's been exciting about this also is the. Is being able to. To be very clear about what were trying to achieve, where were comfortable with things not being correct and where we felt like things had to be correct.
Andy Povey: You talked about the next exhibition or you mentioned very quickly impressing the next exhibition. Is Eleanor, a temporary exhibition. Do you see her being replaced?
Dominique Bouchard: Eleanor is a temporary exhibition. She will come out in November 2027.
Andy Povey: Yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: Leeds Castle has a Christmas takeover from November through December every year. So she will. The exhibition, the Eleanor Exhibition, will get stored away at the end of. In November and Christmas at the castle. I can't reveal what this theme is. Last year it was Neverland. The year before that was Nutcracker. It's a really exciting one this coming year. I think tickets are going on sale very soon too, this space. But Leeds Castle is known for these Amazing Christmas immersive experiences. After Christmas is over, the Eleanor exhibition will go back in and will be in again throughout the year until it comes out for Christmas. And it won't go back in after Christmas. The plan is to do another quasi, temporary, quasi permanent, depending on your perspective.
Dominique Bouchard: Exhibition on Catherine of Aragon, who was the next English queen that owned Leeds? Cashel. She's the second of the queen. We're not going to do all the queens, but Catherine of Aragon is going to be really exciting and the plan is to. We'd like to do another avatar with Catherine. She'll be different than Eleanor of Castile, she'll have a different personality, she's going to have all sorts of things and we may need to make different decisions because the. The quality of the information out on the Internet about Catherine of Aragon is very variable and very much focused on the post king's great question period.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: Whereas, you know, she was with Henry for like 20 years before then and that. That part of her life really doesn't get much of a look in and, you know, and everything becomes about Henry viii. So. So she's an opportunity, you know, Catherine of Aragon is an opportunity to think also differently about what does it mean to be a queen of England. And, you know, at Leeds Castle we have this opportunity to explore that storey through the six queens that owned the castle. It's a really extraordinary place and a really extraordinary series of narratives that we are in a unique position to really think about.
Andy Povey: What an opportunity. Where do I sign up?
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah, I mean, if you haven't come to see the Eleanor exhibition, you need to come. It's not a separate ticket, it's just part of the. The Leeds Castle ticket. So you can come and then your ticket's good for a year, so you can go back over and over again. Eleanor of Castile. AI will throw you out of the room and you can go right back in and ask her more questions. We decided not to turn on facial recognition, for example.
Andy Povey: Not this time.
Dominique Bouchard: Not this time. It was an option.
Andy Povey: Pulling out a little bit from the oral experience of Leadcast. How do you see AI and the avocado model becoming more or increasingly part of what we expect when we go to a museum or a heritage site?
Dominique Bouchard: I think that having something which allows people, visitors to get immediate responses to their questions is really useful because the thing that's a killer for every museum or heritage organisation is when somebody's bored, because one of two things happens once they go to the cafe and they think, I'm never coming. Back here, or the second they walk out the door and they think, I'm never coming back here. So if people are able to go someplace and have a great day out, have a great experience, do something cool that they want to tell their friends about or that they want to do again, or encounter a piece of art or something that really connects to them, that's what these organisations are there for.
Dominique Bouchard: That's why art and heritage, or in the public ownership, I think that if AI can enable those experiences and make them easier for visitors, then I think that's brilliant. I think we have to be very careful, though, as heritage organisations and historians, to make sure that we are comfortable with the level of risk that we're taking on when we delegate responsibility to a computer programme. And we can feel fairly confident about doing that when you're in a lift and you push a floor number and it goes to the right place.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: But when you're talking about a computer giving. Giving historical information that it scrapes not from a curated set of content that you've produced or you can feel confident about, but rather the wider Internet, I think we've got to. We've got to really interrogate our reason around that and make sure that the payoff is worth it. And there's another component to this. We talk about LLMs and walled gardens of content, but if you've got a walled garden of content and you're working with the large language model, that language model has been trained on the wider Internet. So there's no real hermetically sealed walled garden of content. There's no such thing.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: The information that. That LLM has been trained on is going to inform how it responds to questions, even if the majority of the content for those questions comes from a walled garden of content that you've provided. So I think that the biggest challenge and the biggest thing that heritage and museum professionals need to be aware of is we need to become experts to some extent ourselves to understand what the limitations of this resource are, in the same way that when you do a PhD or you study for, you study something, you learn about what the opportunities. What can this source tell me? What are the biases within this source and what are the limits of this source?
Dominique Bouchard: And I think that with AI and using an AI to access wider content that's available on the Internet, you have to ask those same questions, otherwise you're being negligent.
Andy Povey: As a historian, I completely get where you're coming from, but I followed that up with we don't know what the human, the guest, the visitor brings with them, their own experience and stuff that they've. And everything they perceive is going to be. Go through that as a filter.
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah, but that's always going to be the case with anything, whether it's a conventional exhibition or not. I think where lots of heritage organisations or museums make the visitors do too much work in order to understand something, that's where people feel things land flat. And I also think we need to be really transparent with visitors about what is AI and what isn't, what the heritage professionals have written and what the, you know, the wider Internet is telling them. And you know, several years ago, I don't know if you remember this is before the pandemic, there was this big survey about where people trusted their information from, you know, the media, newspapers, social media, all of this. And heritage and museum organisations came out pretty high.
Dominique Bouchard: I'm not sure if you did that again now that they've come out quite as high as they did before because of a number of things.
Andy Povey: Society has changed so much.
Dominique Bouchard: Society has changed and this is sort of pre culture war stuff as well. And I think that in the heritage sector, in the museum sector, we've been able to rely on a kind of inherent trust that the public has had in us. Whether and how much that's been shaken since 2017 and when I think that survey came out and today, I don't know. But I think that when we introduce something which appears to have agency, like an AI into our work, we need to be really clear about how that can affect the sense of trust that the public has in us. At Leeds Castle, our decision to engage with that has been about.
Dominique Bouchard: We've produced little information cards that are in the chapel that says exactly what the AI Eleanor does and does not record that the information is scraped from the Internet, aside from a very series of facts about her life and the exhibition text. And so it may not be correct. And you know, we want to equip people with this because ultimately it is a game, right? It's fun, it's a game. The purpose of it is to interact, to have fun. If the purpose of it is to educate, then that's what the exhibition is for, that we can feel absolutely confident about that research, but we can't real time fact cheque what the AI says. And so we need to give people the information so that they can have a certain degree of scepticism about them.
Dominique Bouchard: When AI, Eleanor of Castile, says her favourite colour is red, love it.
Andy Povey: I mean, you're educating people in ways that we should all question more what we see. Just because you read it on a webpage, it doesn't mean that it's true. It's a brand new type of experience. How does that help new audiences connect with history?
Dominique Bouchard: Sort of old school museum practises. You have to try. We always talk about layered interpretation. And what most people will recognise is if you go to an exhibition, there's the exhibition title which is like really big. Then there's a bit of text explaining it. Then there's another bit of text which is like slightly smaller. And there's another bit of text which is even smaller. It's a bit like an eye chart. And that's kind of our conventional or one stop shop way of giving people an opportunity to delve as deeply as they want. Then you see things like QR codes and those pop up an audio guide. You know, you want to give people as many different ways of encountering information as you can and this is just another way of doing it.
Dominique Bouchard: And so, you know, if it works for some people, great. If it doesn't, then that's fine too. It's all about the, you know, trying to give. If we want to be inclusive. Inclusivity means trying to find someone for literally something, for like literally everyone.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: It doesn't mean that everybody has to like everything, though.
Andy Povey: So you recently announced a change in role. You're moving away from Kent up to Staffordshire.
Dominique Bouchard: Well, it's Warwickshire, I think. Warwickshire. How amazing. I'm an American and I now have some geography quality. This is amazing.
Andy Povey: You've been.
Dominique Bouchard: So many times I've actually said where I thought where something was and I was right. Oh, my gosh,
Andy Povey: You're completely right. Stratford.
Dominique Bouchard: Yeah. Stratford Upon. So, yeah, I'll be going to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust from June. I'm really excited about it. And it's another really exciting heritage location. I mean, the place where Shakespeare was born, where he lived, where he had his family, you know, that kind of home of creativity. Really, really exciting.
Andy Povey: What are you most looking forward to about the new job, new role?
Dominique Bouchard: Every time you start in a new role, you have the real pleasure of learning a lot very quickly. So for me, that's the, that's going to be really exciting. Shakespeare is one of those people whose literary and creative output has made its way into our daily language in a way that really few other people have had that kind of influence. And so how are you trying to help people encounter Shakespeare? When really we don't know all about much about him, given he's extremely famous and everybody's heard of him, I think is also really. That's a big challenge.
Andy Povey: Is there a place for an AI bard? And do you see that coming?
Dominique Bouchard: I don't know. I think, you know, I think with. In the same way that we wouldn't make. I wouldn't make the same decisions for Catherine of Aragon that we've made for Eleanor of Castile. I think if we did decide to go down that road for Shakespeare or for Anne Hathaway or for anybody, we've got to make the decisions for that person in that location, for that audience, in a kind of bespoke way. I think Shakespeare is kind of interesting because he's somebody whose words we have. We've got a lot of his words. But your creative output in that way isn't necessarily how you would speak. You know, most. When authors write novels, the characters in them aren't them.
Andy Povey: Yes. Yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: And so I think there's something interesting there about how we understand, is what we understand about a person and how we extrapolate art into the person, but also what do we know about them as an individual and what do we know about their wider society. And I'm really excited about thinking about that time period and how the world was changing so quickly, so rapidly, and thinking about what that means, how creativity and art get influenced by all of those currents in the world.
Andy Povey: Final question, Dominique. A lot of our listeners aren't going to have access to the budgets or the. All of the resources that you had at Leeds Castle. So if I was at a heritage organisation, I'm just starting to look at AI. What are the practical steps?
Dominique Bouchard: I think you need to understand why you want to do it, what do you want your visitors to get out of it? And I think bells and whistles are great, but what I think people, really, what visitors genuinely respond to is when you are respecting them and treating them as. As your. As your equals. And I think that AI has the opportunity to answer a whole range of questions in. In real time that other. Other people and things don't. So it doesn't. You know, you don't. An environmentally aware AI is really amazing. Yeah, but it. It, you know, but you could still have a chatbot if. If, you know, it's still interesting to do that and to open things up.
Dominique Bouchard: And I think also everybody's kind of interested in what this technology is. We're all kind of learning about it at the same time. So why not involve visitors? In those discussions, rather than seeking to deploy something which is a final finished product, we're all figuring this out together. What heritage organisations and heritage professionals have that visitors don't is expertise and subject matter expertise. So that feels like it could be a really interesting kind of partnership. So I think if there's a small museum out there that wants to engage their visitors, I would literally engage them with that process, sit down with them in ChatGPT or Copilot or one of these LLMs and start asking it questions and talking to it about what you think is interesting and help it and let it help you craft something.
Dominique Bouchard: You know, at the moment a lot of these LLMs that people engage with are kind of like crappy research assistants. Like you can send them off and ask them to do something for you. You shouldn't really expect them to do a particularly good job. The first time you come back, you have to continue. But like, okay, fine. But actually this time what I really need you to do is this.
Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dominique Bouchard: And I think that, you know, everybody at this moment is having that experience in their own personal lives with whatever it is, whether it's coming up with their grocery list or their shopping or figuring out what kind, what size containers they need to get to maximise the usable storage space on a shelf. You know, let's do that collectively so that everybody can do what they're best at together. And I think that I haven't seen. And what I would be really interested in learning about is what does a co creation project look like for a heritage organisation and community groups to work together? Because previously heritage organisations bring their expertise and communities tell you what they want.
Dominique Bouchard: But actually if you can work together on something that shapes an experience that works for both of you, then that could be really cool. And there's no reason why AI can't do that. It's, you know, it's just a computer programme.
Andy Povey: I love that idea. Fascinating. Dominique, I could carry on this conversation for hours. I've really enjoyed talking to you about this.
Dominique Bouchard: It's been a really lovely project to work on and I feel very privileged to have been able to, you know, to help Queen Eleanor get her storey out there. But also to have had this conversation has been really interesting. Thank you very much.
Andy Povey: Well, Dominic, thank you. I really learned something from our conversation, listeners. If you're heading to the Museum and Heritage show at Olympia London, while listening to this episode, make sure you head to Theatre 3 at 2:15 on Wednesday to see Dominique and the rest of the team in Reality Live. And if you are at the show today, come and find the Skip the Queue team. We may have something a little special happening this evening.
Today's episode was brought to you by Merac, edited by Steve Folland, produced by Emily and Sami from Plaster with Socials and Admin by Wenalyn back at Skip the Queue HQ. If you've enjoyed listening, please like comment or leave a review on your podcast app.
It really helps people to find us and means we can bring you many more interesting chats like this one. So that's a wrap. I've been your host, Andy Povey. Until next time folks. Thanks for listening.