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Janet Murray
Janet Murray
Janet Murray is currently a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Murray graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and SUNY Birmingham. She was trained by IBM as a systems programer, and then earned her Ph.D in English Literature from Harvard University. [1]

Prior to coming to Georgia Tech in 1999, Murray was a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT. There, starting in 1971, she taught in the humanities department and led advanced interactive design projects. Murray is widely known as an early developer of humanities computing applications, a theorist of digital media, and an advocate for new educational programs in digital media. Her most notable works are Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, The New Media Reader, and Inventing the Medium.

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Career and Contributions

In the early eighties while Murray was teaching in the humanities department at MIT, her students showed her ELIZA and Zork. They caused Murray to see storytelling potential in new digital mediums. Those ideas inspired Murray to write Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace . Hamlet on the Holodeck is a guide through the mediums of "broadband art, information, and entertainment environments."[2] In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray
discusses the unique properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative. She analyzes the dramatic satisfaction of participatory stories and considers what would be necessary to move interactive fiction from the formats of childish games and confusing labyrinths into a mature and compelling art form. Through a blend of imagination and techno-wizardry, Murray provides both readers and writers with a guide to the storytelling of the future.[3]
In Inventing the Medium, Murray provides provides "a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments."[4] Murray also says that
Innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits--whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps--as belonging to a single new medium: the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity.[5]

Inventing the Medium is frequently used as a learning supplement in classrooms, and has been the subject of much debate and controversy. But it was praised by Harry Jenkins, with him saying it was an "epic accomplishment, one which we will all be mining for years to come."[6] Murray had an active role in developing two new degree programs for Georgia Tech, which were launched in 2004. They were the Ph.D. in Digital Media, and the B.S. in Computational Media.


Awards and Accomplishments

Related Topics

References

  1. http://lmc.gatech.edu/~murray/
  2. http://lmc.gatech.edu/~murray/index.html
  3. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hamlet-holodeck
  4. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-medium
  5. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-medium
  6. http://lmc.gatech.edu/~murray/
  7. http://lmc.gatech.edu/~murray/
  8. http://lmc.gatech.edu/~murray/
  9. http://etv.gatech.edu
  10. http://lmc.gatech.edu/~murray/

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