Keynote Address
Inventing the Medium: Learning and Symbolic Expression from Knucklebones and Senet to Second Life and Spore
The talk will cover the expressive possibilities of the new digital medium, how it relates to the origins of human cognition and culture. Innovative design in digital media draws on processes that harken back to the earliest human inventions of games, story-telling, and symbolic expression. Like other media innovations—language, print, moving images—a new medium of expression changes the way we understand the world, and has the potential for making us smarter and more empathetic with one another. What are the emerging formats and genres that hold the most promise for the developing digital medium? I will attempt to answer that question with illustrations from Georgia Tech projects for studying film, history, and engineering.
Biography
Janet H. Murray is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media at Georgia Tech. She came to Georgia Tech from MIT where she worked for over 25 years teaching humanities and leading educational computing projects. She holds a doctorate in English Literature from Harvard University. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace and is currently working on a textbook, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Design for Digital Environments for MIT Press. Her most recent interactive projects include a digital critical edition of the Hollywood classic, Casablanca, sponsored by NEH and in partnership with the American Film Institute; a set of 3D exercises for learning Statics, a foundational Engineering course, sponsored by NSF; and a multiplayer game that explores the convergence of television story forms and mobile technologies, sponsored by Alcatel Lucent. She is a Trustee of the American Film Institute and a member of the Board for the George Foster Peabody Award.
