Janet Murray

Murray also has an active role in developing two new degree programs at Georgia Tech which were launched in 2004: the Ph.D. in digital media and the B.S. in Computational Media. She was a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors from 2007 to 2013.

Murray's major book is Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, which asks whether the computer can provide the basis for an expressive narrative form, just as print technology supported the development of the novel and film technology supported the development of movies (originally published in 1997 and updated in 2017). She provides an optimistic answer. Murray’s analysis rests on an understanding of the computer as a medium of representation with a distinct set of properties. She argues that the computer is procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial, and that it affords three characteristic (but not unique) pleasures: immersion, agency, and transformation. She defines interactivity as the combination of the procedural and the participatory property which together afford the pleasure of agency. She connects research work on artificial intelligence with cultural forms such as games, movies, literature, and television. Murray’s main point is that the new computer formats expand the possibilities of expression available for storytelling. To her, "digital transmission has opened up the possibility of long-form storytelling, since audiences can view whole seasons after their original broadcast date, and they can follow story over multiple seasons."

Janet Horowitz Murray (born 1946) is an American professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999, she was a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT, where she taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects since 1971. She is well known as an early developer of humanities computing applications, a seminal theorist of digital media, and an advocate of new educational programs in digital media.