History
In the early 1960s the HMDC, originally known as the Government Data Center, was established as part of a national movement for all universities to collect, consolidate, and share social science research data. This movement eventually became known as the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the largest collection of social science data in the world. In the early days associates of the Government Data Center were responsible for managing the distribution of ICPSR tapes housed in Harvard's Office of Information Technology. In 1987 all holdings within the facility were transferred to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of Government (located in Harvard's Littauer building) and in recognition of the widespread use of the facility's data by Harvard scholars the name was changed to the Harvard Data Center. At this time some of the earliest local computer networks, which contained statistical software and computing resources, were established; in addition, associates began transitioning the facility's holdings from tape to more modern media. In the early 1990s associates of the Harvard Data Center played a major role in a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that established a research training program in political economy for various educational institutions. Later on, in 1996, facility associates entered into an agreement with MIT to extend services to MIT users, thus changing the name to the Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC). In 1999 HMDC associates were awarded a multimillion-dollar grant by the NSF and five other funding agencies to create an open-source, digital library for quantitative research data; associates of the facility continue to receive additional grants and funding support from vendors, such as the NSF and the Library of Congress, to continue their research and development projects. In 2005, after the facility was transferred into Harvard's new Center for Government and International Studies complex, the HMDC became a founding member of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), and in 2007 HMDC associates launched their new online data center, the Dataverse Network repository. Today, the HMDC continues to serve the social science community by providing technology support for research, education, and administration.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States of America. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$7.8 billion, the NSF funds approximately 24% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.
Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.
The Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech is a research organization specializing in bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology. The Institute has more than 250 personnel, including over 50 tenured and research faculty. Research at the Institute involves collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, plant pathology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics, synthetic biology and medicine. The institute develops -omic and bioinformatic tools and databases that can be applied to the study of human, animal and plant diseases as well as the discovery of new vaccine, drug and diagnostic targets.
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.
TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) is a facility at Florida State University, the University of Florida, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, that performs magnetic field research in physics, biology, bioengineering, chemistry, geochemistry, biochemistry. It is the only such facility in the US, and is among nine worldwide. The lab is supported by the National Science Foundation and the state of Florida, and works in collaboration with private industry.
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The institute is independently governed and supported as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization under the name Broad Institute Inc., and is partners with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the five Harvard teaching hospitals.
Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) is a research management corporation that builds and operates facilities for the research community. AUI is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation, headquartered in Washington, DC. The President is Dr. Adam Cohen. AUI's major current operating unit is the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which it operates under a Cooperative Agreement with the National Science Foundation.
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
A data library, data archive, or data repository is a collection of numeric and/or geospatial data sets for secondary use in research. A data library is normally part of a larger institution established for research data archiving and to serve the data users of that organisation. The data library tends to house local data collections and provides access to them through various means. A data library may also maintain subscriptions to licensed data resources for its users to access. Whether a data library is also considered a data archive may depend on the extent of unique holdings in the collection, whether long-term preservation services are offered, and whether it serves a broader community. Most public data libraries are listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories.
The US National Virtual Observatory'-NVO- was conceived to allow scientists to access data from multiple astronomical observatories, including ground and space-based facilities, through a single portal. Originally, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the information technology research that created the basic NVO infrastructure through a multi-organization collaborative effort. The NVO was more than a “digital library”; it was a vibrant, growing online research facility akin to a bricks-and-mortar observatory for professional astronomers.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that provides comprehensive advanced computing resources and support services to researchers in Texas and across the USA. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable computational research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.
The Cyprus Institute is a non-profit research and educational institution with a strong scientific and technological orientation, addressing issues of regional interest but of global significance, with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary research and international collaborations. It was formally established in 2005, and started operations in 2007.
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. NICS was home to Kraken, the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home to the world's most powerful computing complex. The mission of NICS, a member of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities.
A data management plan or DMP is a formal document that outlines how data are to be handled both during a research project, and after the project is completed. The goal of a data management plan is to consider the many aspects of data management, metadata generation, data preservation, and analysis before the project begins; this may lead to data being well-managed in the present, and prepared for preservation in the future.
The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is one of the largest academic social research and survey organization in the world, established in 1949. ISR includes more than 250 scientists from many academic disciplines – including political science, psychology, sociology, economics, demography, history, anthropology, and statistics. It has been said to be "the premier center for survey research methodology in the world."
The John von Neumann Center (JVNC) was one of the five pioneering US supercomputer centers created by the National Science Foundation (NSF), established in 1985. The JVNC was the only national center to use the cryogenic ETA10 supercomputer. Named for John von Neumann, the Center was located in Plainsboro Township, New Jersey at Princeton University and operated by The Consortium of Scientific Computing, Inc. an organization of 13 institutes from several states.
ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, was established in 1962. An integral part of the infrastructure of social science research, ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction. Since 1963, ICPSR has offered training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. The ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research offers a comprehensive curriculum in research design, statistics, data analysis, and methodology. To ensure that data resources are available to future generations of scholars, ICPSR curates and preserves data, migrating them to new storage media and file formats as changes in technology warrant. In addition, ICPSR provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis and in conducting their research projects.
Micah Altman is an American social scientist who conducts research in social science informatics. Since 2012, he has worked as the head research scientist in the MIT Libraries, first as director of the Program on Information Science (2012-2018) and subsequently as director of research for the libraries' Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. Altman previously worked at Harvard University. He is known for his work on redistricting, scholarly communication, privacy and open science. Altman is a co-founder of Public Mapping Project, which develops DistrictBuilder, an open-source software.
