The Softalk Apple Project - News

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

Timlynn Babitsky — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 19:21:52 +0000

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.

On September 17th, students, teachers, and organizations – including grassroots Citizen Science and Citizen History projects like ours – will celebrate global collaboration! On this day, experienced global educators and professionals will host connective projects and events and invite public participation. The primary goals of this whole day event are to demonstrate the power of global connectivity in classrooms, schools, institutions of informal learning and universities around the world, and to introduce others to the tools, resources and projects that are available to educators today.

At The Softalk Apple Project and FactMiners, we believe in the power of connected learners... Let's show others what globally connected learning looks like on September 17th! Keep an eye out for our event and for other Global Collaboration Day events. And, if you are a connected learner organization of any stripe, we encourage you to join in and host a virtual event. Everyone everywhere learning together... start with a day, make it a habit.

It's Official - Softalk Magazine Collection Now Available at the Internet Archive

Timlynn Babitsky — Thu, 28 May 2015 18:39:02 +0000

On April 20, 2015 all 48 of the best that we could find issues of Softalk magazine were brought to the Internet Archive Regional Scanning Center in Fort Wayne Indiana for ingestion into the Internet Archive via The Softalk Apple Project. It was an amazing afternoon!

Following the offical hand-off to Facility Coordinator, Jeff Sharpe, and check in by Archivist Jye Afamasaga, Jeff gave us a tour of the facility and walked us through the workflow for preparing the Softalk arcchive to be ingested into the Internet Archive. We then had a chance to personally scan Softalk Vol 1, issues 1 and 2 with the help of "super scanner" LaDonna Hartmann. And finished up our visit with an excellent tour through the many areas in the Allen County Public library in which the Midwest Regional Scanning Center is housed and where stacks and stacks of books, periodicals, pamphlets, magazines, videos, CDs, micro fiches, and so much more are waiting to be ingested into the Internet Archive.

All 48 issues of Softalk magazine are now available for on-line viewing via your browser (actually often better than a downloaded PDF) and, of course, downloadable full-issue PDFs. The official home of the STAP Collection is here.

Now, WE NEED YOUR CROWDCHECK HELP: Before we can give final approval of this initial scan (and pay the invoice for this amazing job), we need to ensure that everything is as we hoped. So here's what you can do to help:

Create an Archive.org user account so you can leave comments.
Pick an issue and leave a comment saying something like: "I'm crowdchecking this issue."
Then using the on-line browser viewer or a PDF, go through the issue from cover to cover and give it a basic "looks good" level check. I don't know what gotchas there might be, but whatever we can do to double-check our scanners' great work, the better.
When you finish your cover-to-cover quick check, edit your first note (if editable) otherwise leave a 2nd short note giving your "A-OK" or notes of any issues we should investigate.

Thank you for whatever help you can provide for this. check-in phase of the project... "Serious fun" ahead once we get to the FactMiners social games part of the project

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

Jim Salmons — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 18:09:59 +0000

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. By dramatically collapsing the pre-research activity of creating the core/source digital archive at The Softalk Apple Project, we will be able to shift considerable resources and move up the schedule to concentrate on the applied R&D initiatives of FactMiners.org's museum informatics mission.

While The Softalk Apple Project is partnering with the Internet Archive as a Contributing Library, the Digitizing Sponsors – meaning the "financial partner" paying for the IA scanning center fees – are project founders, Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky.

"Jim and I are funding this scanning project as one of our 'Pay It Forward' actions in celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary this Valentine's Day, and as a way to kick-off the second year of our post-cancer Bonus Rounds." said Timlynn Babitsky, co-founder and Head Archivist of The Softalk Apple Project, "We're going to turn this project into a super-'serious-fun' experience by taking the magazines to the Midwest Regional Scanning Center to document and participate in the actual scanning process. And we'll be doing this as a stop along our way to DPLAFest, the conclave of folks coming together to celebrate and envision the future of the Digital Public Library of America."

"The acceleration and quality improvements that will result from this partnership with the Internet Archive are certainly significant." said Jim Salmons, co-founder of both projects and tech lead of FactMiners.org, "However, the thing that excites me most is how this partnership clears the way for us to dig into the innovative applied museum informatics research and development agenda we are pursuing at FactMiners. I look forward to detailing our increased R&D activity in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, I know that Timlynn and I are going to have an incredibly fun time going to the Internet Archive Scanning Center to meet Jeff Sharpe and his staff, then on to DPLAFest. Considering what Timlynn and I have been through in these last few years, I am just so happy to even have a 25th wedding anniversary much less have a chance to be working with Timlynn on such exciting Citizen Science and History projects."

For Citizen Science/History projects with a similar need, we encourage you to visit the Internet Archive Scanning Services page, then contact Robert Miller, Global Director of Books and prepare to have a REALLY good technical and distribution partner that will help you achieve your wildest project dreams and then reach for more.

Happy-Healthy Vibes to All, and Happy-Healthy 25th Anniversary to Us (Jim & Timlynn) :D :D

P.S. We promise to "crank it up to 11" for the second year of our Bonus Round! Look out Reaper, not done yet!!!
J&T

Softalk Apple Project 2014 - Researcher of the Year Awards

Jim Salmons — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 17:37:28 +0000

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:

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.
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.
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.

Digging In to the Roger Wagner Archive

Timlynn Babitsky — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 21:08:02 +0000

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.

His next two videos drill down into more specific topics: Assembly Lines #1: The Merlin Assembler; and Assembly Lines #2: Merlin Assembler Editor. Since they are consecutively numbered, be looking for many more in this series as Chris takes us on his passion-driven journey into the heart of the Assembly language.

We are very proud of STAP's first Volunteer Archivist. By taking on the task of archiving the Roger Wagner and Assembly Lines content in the 48 issues of Softalk, Chris is doing an amazing job of reinvigorating interest in Assembly Language programming. We are pleased to have him on board and look forward to more amazing contributions from Chris as the Softalk Apple Project continues to evolve.

Softalk Apple Project 2014 - Volunteer of the Year Awards

Jim Salmons — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 20:43:44 +0000

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. In companion posts, we'll review our first year's progress on our museum informatics and historical research activities, and announce our STAP 2014 Researcher of the Year awards.

Our Volunteers ROCK!

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

First Prize: Peter "Lo-res" Caylor for The Caylor Foundation Scans, his multi-terabyte donation of a complete scan of the 48-issue run of Softalk magazine
Second Prize: Chris Torrence for editing and publishing 'Assembly Lines: The Complete Book by Roger Wagner'
Honorable Mentions: John Gruver, Bob Murphy, Steven Brosch, and Alfred Cellier for contributing missing physical issues to The Softalk Apple Project's physical document collection of Softalk magazine

Each of our esteemed winners will soon be receiving the rare and much-sought-after Softalk Apple Project - 2014 Volunteer of the Year coffee mug, and a Softalk-themed black-and-white jump drive with the 48-issue PDFs of the Caylor Foundation Scans! :-) in recognition of their support and contribution to our grassroots Citizen Science/History project.

We started this project with the high hopes of contributing an archive-quality on-line digital collection of the full run of Softalk magazine. What was most helpful and inspiring to us this first year, once we announced our projects, were the folks who volunteered to help with the effort.

Peter and The Caylor Foundation Scans Donation

By far the most AMAZING and valuable contribution by a volunteer this first year goes to the incredibly energetic and generous "Lo-res" Peter Caylor who has won the Volunteer of the Year award for his contribution of the Caylor Foundation Scans of the full 48-issue run of Softalk.

Some of the issues that Peter scanned were not top quality to begin with due to age and wear issues. Even when scanned "two-up" for what was to be his personal reading pleasure, Peter did a monumental task in scanning the entire 9,304 pages of the Apple edition of Softalk magazine. While we will eventually complement Peter's contribution with an archival-quality scan of the best quality issues we can obtain for scanning, the important thing is that the Caylor Foundation Scans have given us a jump-start for doing and supporting digital humanities and social network research projects. And in 2015, the Caylor Foundation scans will allow us to open our first full-issue public access to the archive.

We were especially pleased to take delivery of Peter's donation at a dinner celebration at Bertha's in Fells Point, Baltimore following our demo of FactMiners and The Softalk Apple Project at #MW2014, the annual Museums and the Web conference.

Chris Torrence, Roger Wagner, 'Assembly Lines'... Oh, my!

Nipping at Peter Caylor's tail for Volunteer of the Year and garnering an impressive second place award is the amazing and always positive and helpful Chris Torrence, our first Volunteer Archivist. Chris took on a monumental and detail-laden task when he set out to edit and publish "the missing second volume" content in what is now "Assembly Lines: The Complete Book", the definitive source of the 33 serially-published Softalk columns on 6502 assembly language programming by the legendary Roger Wagner.

We were happy to help Chris pull together this important resource from the Caylor Foundation scans. We were buoyed by Chris' reciprocal enthusiasm for the STAP project as he agreed to take on the Ninja-like role of Volunteer Linked Open Data Archivist for Roger Wagner content within the STAP archive and its FactMiners' Fact Cloud companion resource. Neither Chris nor we know exactly what that means fully yet, but we are working with experts in graduate training in LIS (Libraries and Information Sciences) to define and prepare self-study materials to help folks identify and take on this role in grassroots Citizen Science/History projects.

Issue Donations Complete our Physical Issue Archive

The year started small and personal with four wonderful folks – John Gruver, Bob Murphy, Steven Brosch, and Alfred Cellier – stepping up to contribute the five missing issues to the official STAP Archive physical document collection. We were truly inspired by the generosity and support from these great folks.

John Gruver – shown here coyly showcasing the missing issues he was about to send us – has been especially helpful – including serving as a rigorous proofreader for Chris' Assembly Lines book – and joined the STAP Advisory Board based on his multi-million page personal collection of vintage computer magazines. Sadly although insured and tracked for shipping, the full 48-issue collection donated to the project by Alfred Collier was unfortunately lost in transit. The loss was not his fault, certainly, and we recognize his support and generosity nonetheless.

A Hearty and Heartfelt 'Thank You!'

To each of these special people, Timlynn and I say a big, "Thank you!" to our volunteers that helped move The Softalk Apple Project forward during its first year of activity. With these great folks as our community core, we look forward to launching into our second year of activity which will begin to show the real progress that was started through the interest and involvement of our wonderful volunteers.

While their reward pales by comparison to the importance of what they have done for us, we are happy to announce that each of our Volunteer of the Year award winners will receive the auspicious and most-rare of cultural artifacts; The Softalk Apple Project Volunteer Corps coffee mug and a Softalk-themed black-and-white jump drive with the 48-issue PDFs of the Caylor Foundation Scans. :D :D

Thank you, Peter, Chris, John, Bob, Steven, and Alfred for your generous support of The Softalk Apple Project during its formative year of development. Each of your contributions has inspired us to enter the New Year with great enthusiasm and comfort knowing that good folks like you are working with us.

If you can see yourself as a STAP volunteer like our intrepid group of first year award winners, please do not hesitate to contact us. Describe your interests and we'll be sure to find a spot for you to help with our Citizen Science/History projects.

Our Softalk Magazine Preservation Talk at #MCN2014

Jim Salmons — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 23:20:11 +0000

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

Jim Salmons — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 17:25:36 +0000

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 companion 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."

At Stanford, Henry Lowood has been Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections since 1983. He is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program and the Thinking Matters program at Stanford, and adjunct faculty at San Jose State University, in the School for Library and Information Science.

Since 2000, he has been director of the How They Got Game Project in the Stanford Humanities Laboratory (SHL), a research project focused on the history of computer games and simulations; between 2004 and 2008 he was co-director of the SHL, as well. Among the many initiatives undertaken by the How They Got Game Project, he is curator of The Machinima Archive and the Archiving Virtual Worlds collection hosted by the Internet Archive and led Stanford’s work on the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, funded by the U.S. Library of Congress and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as other funded research. He has published widely in history of science and technology, library and archival studies, and digital game studies. A complete c.v. is available on-line here.

The Softalk Apple Project is a community project dedicated to the preservation, exploration, and extension of the legacy of Softalk magazine. The 48 monthly issues of Softalk are a unique firsthand historical record of the Microcomputer Revolution, in general, focusing specifically on the impact of Apple Computer. For more information, please visit www.SoftalkApple.com.

FactMiners and Softalk Archive to Demo at MW2014 Conference

Jim Salmons — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 18:57:21 +0000

We are extremely pleased to announce that our proposal to do a live demonstration of the FactMiners ecosystem has been accepted by the Program Committee for the Museums and the Web 2014 annual conference to be held April 2-5 in Baltimore, Maryland USA. While the official announcement and on-line program updates have not been made on the conference website, I believe this link will work if you are interested in our proposal: The FactMiners Social-Game Ecosystem: Leveraging Metamodel Subgraphs in Neo4j Graph Databases. [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.]

During our 1.5 hour demonstration, in addition to showing prototypes of FactMiners gameplay, we will do some 'on-demand' GraphGist metamodeling of conference attendees' on-line collections to explore the potential for adding a FactMiners Fact Cloud to the resources available to visitors and researchers.

We are very pleased to be selected among the organizations and individuals demonstrating their projects and technologies during the MW2014 demo track in Baltimore this April. This will obviously be a GREAT opportunity to meet prospective Fact Cloud host collaborators. But equally as important, we will take best advantage of an invaluable opportunity for a "flash peer review" by demo attendees that will undoubtedly refine and extend our design and implementation of the FactMiners ecosystem.

Welcome Our First Advisory Board Members

Jim Salmons — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 19:25:16 +0000

The Softalk Apple Project is extraordinarily pleased and proud to announce our first members of the project's Advisory Board. They are Steven Weyhrich, John Gruver, and Mike Moshell. Their individual and collective insights and interest in this project will be invaluable to our mission to preserve, explore, and extend the legacy of Softalk magazine.

Steven Weyhrich and John Gruver are our History/Collectors experts who will be most helpful as we not only explore the source content of the Softalk collection, but have an opportunity to chase down "then and now" dimensions related to our "extend" aspect of the "preserve, explore, and extend" mission of the project.

Steven Weyhrich by calling is a family physician at the Methodist Physicians Clinic in Omaha. But Steven has a long-standing love and interest in all things Apple II history-wise. He has just published the "dead trees" version of his Apple II history on Amazon, Sophistication and Simplicity: The Life & Times of the Apple II Computer". Congrats, Steven! We are looking forward to its early December release. In the meantime, you can find an extraordinary amount of historical information at his Apple II History website including this page on the history of Softalk magazine.

And then we have John Gruver... By day, John is the Network and Lab Manager of the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University. At most other times, you'll find him fulfilling his mission as a "certified unofficial flame-keeper" of early microcomputing history. At last count, John has amassed a collection of over 3-million pages of vintage computer magazines! And his favorite, don't you know, is Softalk! John's knowledge and enthusiasm (and his magazine collection resource) along with Steven's vast knowledge of early Apple history will be invaluable to The Softalk Apple Project.

Rounding out our first cohort on the Board is Dr. Mike Moshell. In addition to having "been there, done that" Apple computing-wise during the Softalk days (and he was an avid reader at the time), Mike has phenomenal knowledge and experience that will help us with the FactMiners social-game ecosystem part of The Softalk Apple Project. Mike is currently Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida where he was instrumental in the creation of the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy which is a multi-disciplinary advanced degree program for professional training in computer game design and development. Before that, he was Founder and Chief Scientist of the Visual Systems Laboratory at the UCF Institute for Simulation & Training.

Congratulations and welcome aboard to each of the new members of our Advisory Board. We know their insights and interest will help The Softalk Apple Project to be a rewarding and successful adventure.