Janet H. Murray

Janet Murray teaches information design in the Information Design and Technology Program in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture. Her main interest is interactive narrative, including digital television, virtual reality, video games and hypertexts, which is found in her recent book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Other research interests include interactive design, educational computing, Victorian studies and applications of advanced computing environments.

She began her career as a scholar of English narrative, and has published several volumes detailing the lives of Victorian women. This work grew out of her interest in what was left out of the great Victorian novels -- what could not be said within the conventional narrative and cultural structures of that time and place. She is drawn by the new digital medium because -- like the book or the movie camera before it -- it expands our ability to capture human experience and holds the promise of expanding human understanding and human sympathies.

She has been working with advanced computing environments since the early 1980s when she became inspired by the early work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab to initiate projects in humanities computing that formed some of the first explorations of educational "multimedia." She attempted this work because of her training by IBM as a systems programmer in the late 1960s. She is still involved with producing and designing educational computing projects at MIT, including the web-based Jewish Women's Archive. Janet has a Ph.D. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University.

Contact information:

Janet Murray
Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center
College of Computing
801 Atlantic Drive
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, 30332-0280
E-mail: janet.murray@lcc.gatech.edu