Brown University established the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship, or IRIS, as it is commonly known, to explore new uses of computing technology in research, teaching and learning. To address the needs of today's "idea workers," IRIS worked to develop a rich set of experimental tools that provide people with new ways to create, retrieve and organize information.
IRIS was founded by Andries van Dam, William S. Shipp, and Norman Meyrowitz in August 1983 and closed its doors in June 1994. Shipp, the founding director, retired in 1990, and between 1990 and 1992 Meyrowitz and Martin J. Michel served as co-directors. From 1992 to its close, Paul Kahn directed the Institute.
The Institute's most important accomplishment was the creation of Intermedia, an advanced hypertext system. Links on this page lead to an introduction to Intermedia and a complete list of IRIS publications and technical reports.
David B. Stevenson '96, an undergraduate research assistant at IRIS, created WWW versions of a selection of Intermedia materials entitled the Religion in England Web and Landow has also created an html version of Stevenson's Freud Web. The webs have been reformatted, expanded, and otherwisemodified several times since their creation; links take you to the latest versions within the Victorian Web.
