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.

A core goal of The Softalk Apple Project is to serve as a "honeypot" to attract and support academic and tech-related researchers. Whether our prospective collaborators are interested in Softalk-specific research projects, or simply need access to Softalk's historic content in support of more general research in the domain of the digital and microcomputer revolutions of the late 20th Century, we're here to help.

Meet Our 2014 Researchers of the Year

Our Winners for The Softalk Apple Project 2014 Researcher of the Year Award are:

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  First Prize: Chris Torrence – our "two-fer" winner of both a Researcher AND Volunteer of the Year award – for his considerable effort to curate and publish the text corpus of Roger Wagner's Assembly Lines column, and his pioneering status as our first Volunteer Archivist working with us to develop a Linked Open Data template and workflow for Person-specific "hub pages" as part of the FactMiners' Fact Cloud companion to the Softalk archive.

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  Second Prize: Laine Nooney for working with us in support of her doctoral dissertation research on Sierra On-Line and Roberta Williams; and especially for her interest in expanding our research collaborations by bringing our third award recipient into the project in support of their still-stealth project involving a considerable epistemological (hint, hint) text corpus within the Softalk content.

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  Honorable Mention: Kevin Driscoll for his work with Laine Nooney on some as-yet-unannounced research. In addition to their own research agenda, the work they produce will provide our FactMiners.org developers a valuable text corpus on which to do some proof-of-concept explorations of a text analysis strategy that combines "Rainman-like" machine-learning in a feedback loop with our "Sherlock-like" semantics of FactMiners' metamodel subgraph design pattern.

With this award announcement we publicly and enthusiastically thank each of our recipients for their efforts to establish a "beachhead" in the research community that will surely position The Softalk Apple Project for an even more exciting year ahead. We look forward to increasing our activity in support of Chris' Volunteer Archivist work. And we already know that Laine and Kevin's work is going to help fast-track some of our proof-of-concept development work related to our companion research project, www.FactMiners.org.

As with our Volunteer of the Year award recipients, our Researchers of the Year will soon be receiving their award swag; a genuine, limited edition STAP Researcher of the Year coffee mug and a Softalk-themed black-and-white jump drive with the 48-issue PDFs of the Caylor Foundation Scans! :-)

Thank you, Chris, Laine and Kevin! Your interest and exciting work helps to pump up our enthusiasm and belief in the importance and "serious fun" to be had by working together on this grassroots community project.