Communications Forum

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A complete history of the MIT Communications Forum is one valuable asset held in the archives of the New Media Museum.

As the first Post Doctoral Associate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program, Mary Hopper served as Managing Editor of the MIT Media in Transition Project. In addition, her duties included helping David Thorburn to run the project’s parent program, the MIT Communications Forum. The New Media Museum holds complete records of all of Hopper’s work on the project, her writing and editing of “summaries” for the project, her communication with well-known authors about those as well as complete backups of the original Web sites she managed with her and other’s names on the original credits on the main site as well as all of her own reporting.

A subset of her duties included putting her archival knowledge to work in order to generate a complete history and finding aid about the forum that, among other things, included all of the posters and summaries of every event that was run by the organization since its inception in 1985 until the year 2000. This is inclusive of the time when it was under the auspices of the Research Program on Communications Policy before it was transferred to the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. Hopper created three copies of the archive. One copy was given to the Comparative Media Studies program office, one copy went to the MIT Archives and one copy remained with her for her portfolio and is now in the New Media Museum’s archive. An inventory of the contents of the archive will be posted here at a later date.

Here is a link to MIT’s version of the archive.
MIT Communications Forum & MIT Research Program on Communications Policy: Records 1985 – 1999 (MIT Archives Space)

This is a logo that Mary Hopper helped David Thorburn create while serving as the first Post Doc of Comparative Media Studies at MIT.

Logo co-designed, David Thorburn and Mary Hopper, 1998

This is a poster that is available to display.

Note: These summaries were written by Mary Hopper near the end of her tenure as a Post Doctoral Associate at MIT in 2000.

“Real Artists Don’t Go to MIT”, February 24, 2000
John Maeda

The Digital Library, April 20, 2000
Clifford Lynch, Deanna Marcum, Ann Wolpert, Marlene Manoff