Keynote Janet H. Murray

On Wednesday November 5 2003 Professor Janet H. Murray presented her keynote presentation titled: ‘What are games made of ?’.

Professor Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized interaction designer, specializing in digital narrative and digital humanities. She graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and SUNY Binghamton, and was trained by IBM as a systems programmer before earning a PhD in English Literature from Harvard, where she specialized in the English novel. In the early 1980s she was teaching humanities at MIT when her students showed her Eliza and Zork, and she recognized the possibilities for storytelling in the new digital medium. Building on these explorations and on early Media Lab experiments with interactive video, Murray led humanities educational projects at MIT in the 1980s and 1990s and established the first university course in interactive narrative.

Murray is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; MIT Press 1998), which has been translated into 5 languages, and is widely used as a roadmap to emerging broadband art, information, and entertainment environments, and Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011) which has been hailed by Henry Jenkins as “an epic accomplishment, one which we will all be mining for years to come.” Her projects have been funded by IBM, Apple Computer, Intel Corporation, Motorola Research, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco/Scientific Atlanta, the Annenberg-CPB Project, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.

Click here to read more about professor Janet H. Murray.