Hunter College > Social Sciences Lab > Faculty > Description of Lab Resources

Description of Lab Resources

The Social Sciences Computing Lab is a resource serving a variety of instructional and research needs of Hunter faculty and students. The Lab offers the following facilities and services:

•) The 18-workstation Main Lab (Room 606 West) is used primarily as a computer classroom for social science classes and secondarily (at hours when the Lab is not reserved for classes) as a walk-in lab available to all Hunter students, faculty and staff. This facility is outfitted with the following equipment:

•) 18 Dell GX-150 Pentium III, 1GHz computers, each with 128Mb memory, CDROM, Zip drive and headphones

•) A ceiling-mounted LCD projector (NEC VT440) connected to the instructor's workstation

•) Software (Altiris Vision) that allows the instructor to broadcast to or control the students' workstations

•) A high-speed laser printer (HP4000T) capable of printing double-sided copy (employed with procedures for appropriate rationing)

•) Two dot matrix printers for draft output

•) Specialized software to meet the needs of a variety of classes in social-science-related quantitative methods -- e.g. SAS, SPSS, Stata, ArcView, MapInfo

The Lab's mandate is to serve the instructional and research computing needs of the following social science departments: Anthropology, Economics, History, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Urban Affairs & Planning. The Main Lab is currently used primarily by classes of the latter three departments. Please contact the Lab Director if you want to schedule a single session in the Lab. Reservations for multiple sessions must usually be arranged with your department chair a full semester ahead of time, and may require flexibility in scheduling the class meeting time.

Further resources for social science instructors and researchers are based in Room 607 West, which houses the Lab's offices and network equipment and also serves as the entranceway into the Main Lab during walk-in hours. The following additional resources are available by arrangement with the Lab Director:

•) A powerful unix workstation -- a Sun Enterprise 250 with two 400MHz UltraSPARC II processors, 2 Gb of memory, and 54 Gb disk space. This computer is accessed remotely by researchers who use it for running statistical procedures on large datasets and for doing processor-intensive mathematical modeling.

•) A Linux-based web server for faculty and graduate student web pages.

•) A color inkjet printer (HP 1220C) capable of printing sheets up to 13"x19" in size.

•) A scanner with light-capacity sheet feeder (HP 6250C).

•) Optical Mark Recognition software (Remark) for scanning questionnaires into SPSS.

•) A PC workstation available for faculty use.

The Lab Director serves as a source for social-science-related data for the Hunter community, administering Hunter's membership in the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world's largest repository of social data.

This page was last updated on July 16, 2003