Blogs

Previously Unknown Softalk Top 30 List for September 1984! (as I imagine it...)

A page mockup of Peter Caylor's Forecast for the Top 30 list of an imagined "49th issues" of Softalk

I recently had the chance to combine my love for retro computing and Softalk magazine with a "homework" assignment required for a Decision Support Systems class I've been taking. We needed to exercise our skills in model-based forecasting, so I saw a great opportunity to use this assignment to take a much closer look at the time-series of data represented by the famous Top 30 software sales charts at the back of every issue of Softalk (except the first).

Assembly Lines: The Complete Book

Assembly Lines: The Complete Book cover

I am very excited to announce that Assembly Lines: The Complete Book is now available as a hardcover from Lulu press. Roger Wagner’s Assembly Lines articles originally appeared in Softalk magazine from October 1980 to June 1983. The first fifteen articles were reprinted in 1982 in Assembly Lines: The Book. Now, for the first time, all thirty-three articles are available in one complete volume.

Help Send Jim to Museums and the Web 2014 Conference

We're using the amazing GoFundMe.com platform to solicit donations to support sending STAP Research Director Jim Salmons (that'd be me) to the Museums and the Web 2014 conference (MW2014), next month in Baltimore.

Museums and the Web is the premiere conference where hundreds of museum and archive professionals from around the world gather to exchange ideas, train newcomers into the field (that'd be us), and network to establish collaborations that will empower their research and visitor agendas throughout the year.

This conference is the BEST place to establish valuable collaborative relationships to support The Softalk Apple Project and the FactMiners social-game platform.

Softalk Magazine FactMiners Fact Cloud to be CIDOC-CRM Compliant

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The Softalk Apple Project is pleased to announce adoption of the Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) of the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The CIDOC-CRM is an 'ontology' for cultural heritage information, in other words it describes in a formal language the concepts and relations relevant to the documentation of cultural heritage. This ISO standard will be used as the reference model for the development of the FactMiners Fact Cloud metamodel that will logically organize the 'facts' to be 'mined' out of the digital archive of Softalk magazine, respecting both the elements of its editorial content and the complex document structure of a magazine.

FactMiners Milestone: Neo4j GraphGist Design Docs On-line

I have been very quiet during the year-end holiday and throughout January. That is because I have been busy in the 'deep weeds' of moving the FactMiners social-game ecosystem forward. Quick summary... The FactMiners game is the means we will use to create an incredible 'Fact Cloud' of all the information in all 48 issues of Softalk magazine. It is an ambitious mission, but one that is guaranteed to be "serious fun"– especially when we create a crowdsource game technology and community (that's the ecosystem scope of this).

FactMiners: The Pursuit of Serious Fun with Images and Robots

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In this concluding post of the series about the potential for FactMiners to contribute to the "serious fun" at the British Library Image Collection, we set some goals and chart a course forward to add the 'Seeing Eye Child' Robot Adoption Agency to the selection of social-learning games to be developed by, and available to, the FactMiners gaming community.

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