KEYNOTE

JANET MURRAY [See PowerPoint slides or PDF]

Inventing the Medium

Janet Murray opened with a statement by Daniel Hillis, in his Pattern in the Stone, that pattern-making is the key to our humanist endeavor, both in creating reality and giving cultural value (see slide 3). The key issue of her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck was whether the computing medium could produce great art, and her answer was a clear yes - but only when we understand and freely invent the medium, free of earlier "legacy systems". For her students from different backgrounds, the computer is effectively a poster, a toaster/appliance, a TV, a telephone, a card catalog or a rhizome root structure in the assumptions they wield and work under.

A clip from The Great Train Robbery dramatized how legacy conventions (in this case painting and theater) frame any new medium before it discovers its own strengths and invents its most effective conventions (camera movement, framing, editing, etc.). And today most users, unclear about their assumptions, intentions or boundaries produce confusing and confused work that is unclear about what it is or who it is addressing.

The new paradigms for designing the new medium are being developed within the new "discipline" of Information Design (such as at Georgia Tech's Information Design & Technology program at Murray's own institution of Georgia Tech). It was interesting that such new areas are often located within humanities divisions, as Georgia's is--in the School of Literature, Communication & Culture.

Two of the "Principles of Interactivity" (in Murray's next book of that title) she generalized as:

• projects on the Internet want to be archives; and
• they all want to be simulations.

There is great interest also in creating what she calls "kaleidoscopic structure" where archives, situations can be viewed from different viewpoints.

Hence the importance of naming and cataloging, and the critical role of librarians as witnessed in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker & Susan Leigh Star (MIT Press, 1999).

Her work at the MIT Shakespeare Archive showed her that the medium of an original didn't matter, whether it be text, film, audio, etc. What mattered was the scene and one needed to index the material despite its medium. So clearly one way that humanists need computers is to be able to label things in different ways.

This was a medium that could not only illustrate what it was you wanted to say, but in its very nature could assist in clarifying your message and even be instrumental in the development of an argument. The computer then could be thought of as a medium of representation that can make signs, create patterns of meaning, preserve and transmit patterns and expand our understanding and humanity.

As with the book and the movie, with new technology you get greater expressiveness, ( so, for example, our concept of heroism expands when we can see a photography by Matthew Brady or Dorothea Lange) and the Internet is the most capacious medium we have had.

Janet Murray then showed a few examples of the projects she was involved with and what they were teaching her about the medium. In the Jewish Women's Archive the website was instigating an examination of how one can reinvent the form of biography. What, for instance, were the telling life-events we can code for in documentation, and can people with very different life-experiences code them? At the Paul Revere House, there was the question of how to put computing power into the hands of curators who know the complexities of people's lives and might take on the task of visualizing narrative structures. And in a project with the American Film Institute, that includes producing a digital edition of Casablanca (as a prototype of the AFI Networked Classics Collection, a portal and common information architecture for the study of American film art), there is the challenge of building a catalog of American film by scene and keyword. Here, Murray commented there was a need to establish an open structure (a standard not a canon) that would allow the formerly marginalized to comment on the canonical.

The challenge in a new medium is to think about a complex array, something you know a lot about and are trying to explain in a way beyond the means at hand and then to think through what the core tasks are and what they would be like if they were doable in the most ideal way. She advised that it was good to look for harbinger materials that were outgrowing their form or medium. Then exploit the medium and its own patterns and create authoring tools, keeping an active vision of what might be possible. She invoked what she called an encyclopedic "British Museum" stance in which any artifact in any medium, indexed at all levels of granularity, could be brought to one's attention.

To design for the future environment, one will need: standardized metadata; distributed annotation; an open-ended archive; a growing ability to manipulate with kaleidoscopic power; and a growing ability to replay and readjust parameters. She itemized some key pitfalls to avoid, largely to do with legacy formats and processes, often so internalized as to not be recognizable, and invoking Hillis' mantra about pattern's ability to create reality, closed by reminding us what was and what was not "sacred." It was not the book, it was not a process: it was the expansion of human knowledge and human understanding.

History | Interdisciplinary Studies | Language & Literature | Performing Arts | Visual & Media Studies