Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Research interests: Interactive narrative and eTV, interactive gaming, encyclopedic media
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My primary research interests are interactive design, interactive narrative, and the history and development of representational media. My latest book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether we can expect this new medium to support a new expressive art form, comparable to the Shakespearean theater or the Victorian novel in its ability to move and enlighten us. I am mostly optimistic about this possibility. I am currently working on a textbook, Principles of Interactive Design, which unites the myriad traditional disciplines in which interactive designers are now trained into a single coherent digitally focused design vocabulary. I am working on several projects that prototype broadband entertainment and information applications, including work with interactive television and with history museums.
Professor
Research interests: Performance Studies, media studies, cultural studies, popular music
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Primary interest is in Performance Studies, particularly the relationship between various forms of performance and media. Publications include: From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance, and articles on topics ranging from experimental theatre and performance art to stand-up comedy and rock music. Most recent book is Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Graduate teaching includes a course in media studies, with emphasis on the history and culture of television, recorded sound and digital media.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Videogame criticism, videogame rhetoric, and visualization, including game design and educational, persuasive, and political speech in games
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Primary interests include videogame criticism, videogame rhetoric, historical and material approaches to computer platforms, and the ways videogames are used outside of entertainment. Current projects include a book on the uses of videogames, a book on games and adaptation, and research on games and journalism.
Professor
Wesley Chair of New Media Studies
Research interests: Augmented Reality design, media theory
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My Primary interest is the social and cultural impact of computers and the use of computers as new medium for verbal and visual communication. Publications include Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, several book reviews and numerous articles on reading, writing, and visualization in computer environments. Projects include Developed Storyspace, a hypertextual computer program, in collaboration with author and educator Michael Joyce. I am currently conducting research with other professors in the GVU on multimedia systems for collaborative writing and on the use of text and speech in computer-controlled virtual environments. Graduate teaching includes courses in the rhetoric of electronic environments and multimedia design.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Critical design, participatory design, the construction of publics, imaging the city, community robotics.
My research explores the intersection of design practice, art discourse, technology and activism, particularly in urban contexts. Recent design projects include the development of public programs, technology platforms, and software that foster critical and participatory engagement with emerging technologies, including robotics, sensing and imaging, and mapping. Current research projects include a theoretical investigation of construction of publics through design and a survey of the intersections between contemporary art and information technology.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Computational narrative, cognitive semantics, imaginative fiction for social critique and analysis, experimental and cross-cultural narrative, and social aspects of user-interface design.
Primary interests include computational (interactive and generative) narrative, cognitive semantics, imaginative fiction (story/virtual world construction) for social critique and empowerment, experimental and cross-cultural narrative forms, and social aspects of user-interface design. I am especially interested in the intersections of the above concerns, for example how cognitive science accounts of imagination (such as conceptual bending and metaphor) can inform design of expressive computational artifacts, or how construction of computational semantic models can inform design for social empowerment. Recent publications include "GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System" in Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (MIT Press, 2007) and "Algebra of Identity" in Critical Digital Studies: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).
Associate Professor
Research interests: Intellectual property, technical communication, global distance learning
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TyAnna K. Herrington's background in law contributes to her interest in intellectual property issues, although her specialization in rhetoric and technical communication drives her ideological inquiry. Herrington's books treat issues in law: Controlling Voices: Intellectual Property, Humanistic Studies, and the Internet (SIU Press, 2001) examines the digital influence on ideological conflict in intellectual property law and A Legal Primer for Technical Communicators, Multimedia Developers, Graphic Designers, and other Creative Communicators (Longman Publishers, 2003) provides explanations of the legal problems that beginning creative developers are likely to encounter. Although many of her publications treat issues in intellectual property, the first amendment, and the work for hire doctrine, she has also published articles treating ethics and document design. Supported by a Fulbright grant to St. Petersburg, Russia, Herrington developed and continues to expand the Global Classroom Project, a distance learning project in technical communication that electronically links students and faculty in St. Petersburg, Russia with those at Georgia Tech. Herrington teaches technical communication and intellectual property courses both virtually and in the networked computer-based classroom. Her work in this and other digital projects created for the department emphasizes the importance and necessity of contextually based understanding of communication that requires experiential learning for students who face communication challenges and depend on digital connectivity, often across differing time zones, spaces, cultures, disciplines and bases of motivation.
Professor
Chair, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Research interests: Newtonian science, scientific narrative
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Primary interests are scientific and technological discourse. Dr. Knoespel has authored a book on the methodology of early scientific commentary and has contributed chapters to books on the strategies of scientific and technological discourse. Associate editor of the interdisciplinary science and literature journal, Configurations. He was a visiting professor at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Edelstein Center for the History of Science and Technology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Dr. Knoespel's current research includes the development of scientific communication within electronic networks and research in distance learning. His graduate teaching includes courses in international communication.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Interactive narrative, serious game design and development, cognitive architectures, intelligent agents, human-computer interaction, and board game studies as applied to digital game design.
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My research explores artificial intelligence approaches to story management, synthetic characters, and logical representations of story for interactive narratives. My current work is focused on several domains: 1) the use of interactive narrative for training and education, 2) intelligent director agents and coordination with synthetic characters, 3) logical story representation and authoring tools, and 4) the study of real-world interactive drama and improvisation techniques. I have also begun preliminary research on analyzing the game mechanics used in designer board games, their relationship to or possible influence on the design of current or hypothetical digital games, and a meta-level discussion about how this analysis could be improved.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Tangible & computational narratives, media spaces & interfaces, physical sensing & interaction technologies
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Primary research interests include the application of emerging physical sensing and computer-interaction technologies to media arts and entertainment, such as narrative expression and experience. In particular, I am interested tangible interfaces and physical/digital co-design for collaborative and multi-user interaction with media applications and environments. Current research projects include the design of tabletop interaction platforms for interactive narratives and improvisational gameplay. Graduate teaching includes courses on experimental media and expressive computing.
Professor
Associate Dean, Ivan Allen College
Research interests: Digital media project testing and management, web-based distance learning
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Primary interests are in the analysis of digital media audiences, multimedia project management and testing and distance learning. Corporate consulting includes work in industrial use of the Internet, testing of digital products and the design and implementation of multimedia distance learning. Current research focuses on the impact of design theory on multimedia. Publications include co-authorship of Functional Writing, Readings in Technical Writing, and A Guide to Technical Writing, as well as articles on problem design and communication pedagogy. Current work involves the creation and testing of technology-enhanced courses and Web-based distance learning courses in the humanities and social sciences. Graduate teaching includes courses in distance learning, project design and testing, and Web demographics.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Interactive real-time 3-dimensional virtual environments focusing on ways to shape their content and improve their spatial design, their presentation, and investigate their range of interaction
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My research (and a lot of my teaching) deals with challenges posed by 3D virtual spaces, issues of games and film, and increasingly a look at play as performance. This work is often conducted in practical experiments, which are carried out in the Digital World and Image Group (DWIG http://dwig.lcc.gatech.edu/). Our most recent research interest is in Digital Performance and various questions of Machinima. Our design approach is heavily user-centered and the main question is how to widen the expressive range available to a player/ user of digital media. Upcoming publications include a book on Video Game Spaces as well as work on the first academic Reader on Machinima.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Sociology of massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds, spatial media, game design
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My recent research focus has been on the ways in which game design influence emergent social behavior in multiplayer games, virtual worlds and alternate reality games. Recent papers have looked at phenomena such as "productive play," in which games and play, far from being inherently unproductive, become a nucleus for creativity and cultural production. I`m also interested in the notion of "spatial media" and the ways in which space, physical or virtual, can be used as a communication and narrative medium. My research group, the Emergent Game Group {egg}, is concerned with both the study and creation of multiplayer games. I also collaborate with Ludica, a women`s game collective I co-founded to address issues of gender and games, am active in the "games for change," game art and independent game development movements and am chair of the IndieCade independent game Festival.
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Media studies, science studies, biotechnology and culture
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Primary research interest is the relationship between bodies and technologies in biotechnology and biomedicine. Other areas of interest include the intersections between art and science, new media art and science fiction. I am currently completing a book entitled Bioinformatic Bodies, and other publications include essays in the anthologies, Body Modification (Sage, 1999), LifeScience (Springer, 1999), Machine Time (V2/NAI, 2000) and Flesh-Eating Technologies (Semiotext(e), forthcoming). From 1997-2001 I was a part of the art group Fakeshop, which exhibited/performed work internationally at Ars Electronica, MIT, Siggraph and the Whitney Biennial. My current activities are focused on Biotech Hobbyist, an inter-disciplinary collective exploring collaborations between art and biology.
lcc.gatech.edu