News

The Softalk Apple Project & FactMiners to Host Global Collaboration Day Event!

The official announcement is forthcoming, but here's a peek into what's ahead...

The Softalk Apple Project and FactMiners are pleased to announce that we will host a Global Collaboration Day Event "all day" on September 17th.! :-)

Details of our event will be forthcoming and announced here as an update to this news item. Time is short, so we're in crunch mode to be ready for this fun event.

Softalk Apple Project Partners with Internet Archive to Accelerate Magazine Digitization and FactMiners R&D

The Softalk Apple Project and FactMiners.org are very pleased to announce our partnership with the Internet Archive which will dramatically accelerate the digitization, preservation, and public access to an archival-quality digital collection of the full 48-issue run of the Apple edition of Softalk magazine.

Softalk Apple Project 2014 - Researcher of the Year Awards

As part of our commitment to support research collaborations, we are very happy to announce The Softalk Apple Project 2014 Researcher of the Year Award recipients; Chris Torrance, Laine Nooney, and Kevin Driscoll. The recipients of this inaugural year of our Researcher award are especially noteworthy as they have been trailblazers in our effort to establish The Softalk Apple Project as a vital, grassroots (unaffiliated and so-far unfunded) Citizen Science/History project.

Digging In to the Roger Wagner Archive

For all of you Assembly Lines fans out there, STAP's multi-award winning Chris Torrence recently posted this excellent YouTube video showcasing the new book, Assembly Lines: The Complete Book, the first in his series of Assembly Lines videos. To date he has posted three videos. The first of his videos is reposted here. It provides an overview of the table of contents with general information about the book itself and where you can get it.

Softalk Apple Project 2014 - Volunteer of the Year Awards

As we wrap up the first full year of The Softalk Apple Project (STAP), Timlynn and I are pleased to report our progress. While nearly everything done during the first year of activity has contributed in its own small way to moving our projects toward sustainability, two areas are especially noteworthy; our Volunteer activity and our Research "Honeypot" initiative. Here we are happy to acknowledge and celebrate the efforts of our volunteers.

Our Softalk Magazine Preservation Talk at #MCN2014

We invite you to view the "Lively Talkin' Slide" Edition of our recent presentation about The Softalk Apple Project and our related FactMiners project at #MCN2014, the premiere museum informatics conference. We again thank the Museum Computer Network Association and PICTION for sponsoring our Emerging Professional scholarship that enabled Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky to attend the conference to learn, network with Kindred Spirits, and make our presentation to the museum informatics community. The opportunity for growth of both our projects was phemonenal and will be a source of enthusiasm for our continued evolution of these grassroots Citizen Science/History projects.

Henry Lowood Joins STAP Advisory Board

We are extremely pleased to announce that Henry Lowood, Curator of the History of Technology and Film & Media Collections of Stanford Libraries, has joined the Softalk Apple Project (STAP) Advisory Board.

"As a grassroots community project, Henry's deep and broad knowledge of museum informatics and the requirements for digital collections preservation and management will be invaluable," said Jim Salmons, a founding organizer of the project and tech lead on the FactMiners sub-project, "In addition, his personal deep interest and activity in preserving and exploring the evolution of computer games is a big plus as we evolve the FactMiners social-game ecosystem as an innovative way to document and explore cultural heritiage digital collections."

FactMiners and Softalk Archive to Demo at MW2014 Conference

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We are extremely pleased to announce that our proposal, The FactMiners Social-Game Ecosystem: Leveraging Metamodel Subgraphs in Neo4j Graph Databases, has been accepted by the Program Committee for the Demonstration Track of the Museums and the Web 2014 annual conference to be held April 2-5 in Baltimore, Maryland USA. [Note: Sometimes this link to the proposal doesn't "take" until the second time you try it. Will update when official announcement and program update is on-line.]