Resources at Duke University

Computing

The Sociology Department has taken a leading role in the development of social science computing resources at Duke. The department operates a Novell Local Area Network. Networked PCs running Windows are located in faculty and student offices. These PCs provide access to Windows based statistical and productivity applications and to a secondary Unix/Linux network running Digital Unix and additional statistical software. The majority of faculty and dissertation research is performed on these Unix machines which have the capacity to handle large data sets and the speed to perform intensive computation.

The departmental network has full connectivity to the Internet via a campuswide, broadband network. E mail, secure file transfer, and campus-wide wireless web access are available. Network connections are available to access files saved to a secure network drive from work or home. A social science PC lab consisting of eight P4 2.8GHzclass PCs (4 windows machines and 4 Linux machines with a window emulation) is located in and managed by the department. A cluster of 16 Dell Precision 670n running Linux, which is part of a campuswide, public Unix system, is adjacent to the lab.

A Social Science Data Center is maintained by the computing staff. This includes an extensive repository of machine-readable data holdings from ICPSR, the Roper Center, federal agencies and other sources, the holdings of which are maintained online and accessed through the Sociology Unix network and other Unix networks throughout campus. The staff are experienced at handling data from a wide variety of sources in varied formats.

A wide range of statistical software is installed on the PC and Unix platforms. Software includes SAS, SPSS, Stata, SPlus, Gauss, LISREL, PRELIS, Limdep, Rate, and Mathematica. The department provides a variety of standard word processing, spreadsheet, graphic presentation and database packages for use in Windows and Linux on the LAN.

The technical support staff, headed by Robert Jackson, provides faculty and graduate students a wide range of system administration, consulting, teaching, documentation and data library services.

Libraries

Perkins Library, with over 4,000,000 volumes in its collection, ranks among the top university libraries in the nation. Located less than 100 yards from the Department of Sociology, the main library has study facilities for Ph.D. students. Among the specialized collections of interest to sociologists are the vast demographic, political, and economic materials in the Public Documents and Maps Department. The international focus is continued by important holdings in Canadian studies, Japanese business and social history, South Asian studies, and Latin American studies. The Special Collections Department contains primary materials in Women's Studies, advertising and business history, social history of the Southern United States, and Nazi propaganda literature. In addition, the libraries of the three professional schools in Medicine, Law, and Business augment Perkins' collections, particularly in the study of aging, criminology, and organizational behavior. Duke's electronic network allows remote access to the online catalogs of Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, as well as a large number of electronic databases and fulltext files. The Library is committed to identifying and providing scholars with the resources they need, whether currently in our collections or available from other locations through InterLibrary Loan or electronic retrieval.

Professional Activities

Members of the Department are active in a wide array of professional activities. Recent or scheduled conferences and seminars held at Duke have focused on comparative and historical research methodology, commodity chains in global capitalism, stress processes, comparative social stratification, ideas and reality of the Pacific Rim, citizenship and civil society, the history of game theory in the social sciences, life expectancy among healthy adults, transitions to democracy, and the politics of race, class, and gender. Conferences such as these provide exciting intellectual opportunities for graduate students. Members of the department are also active as elected officers or committee members of numerous national and regional professional associations, and as editorial members of the boards of major professional journals. In addition to providing students with guidance in teaching and research tasks, this ready accessibility provides insight into the administrative side of faculty life.

Office Space

Students are assigned office space in the Department. In addition to shared access to a personal computer and ready access to the UNIX cluster and high-performance PC cluster in the Sociology/Psychology building, and convenient access to Perkins library, this arrangement facilitates close contact among faculty and students and among students at different levels of the program.

Interdepartmental Opportunities

Other social science and humanities departments offer courses and programs that are of interest to many graduate students in Sociology. Among those with strong national reputations and distinguished faculties are Economics, History, Political Science, Psychology, Public Policy Studies, Religion, Literature, the interdisciplinary program in German Studies administered by the Department of German Languages and Literature, and the Institute for Statistics and Decision Sciences.

Exchange Programs

Duke and its sociology department have exchange agreements with a number of German universities. Two to three German graduate students come to spend a year at Duke's sociology department each year from universities at Erlangen and Bamberg. Duke University also has a special fellowship arrangement with the Fulbright program that funds graduate students to spend a year at the Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University. This special program is a universitywide competition that sociology graduate students have done well in during the last few years.

Research Triangle Area

Duke University is located in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, an area consisting of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and their surrounding counties. The area's name originated with the Research Triangle Park located midway between the three cities. The Research Triangle is the site of a number of high technology research institutes of commercial firms and government agencies as well as three major research universities (Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University). The National Humanities Center is located in the Research Triangle, as is the National Institute for Statistical Sciences, SAS, the Research Triangle Institute, and other organizations of potential interest to sociologists. The professional employment opportunities in the local area, the cultural facilities associated with three major universities (a major resident repertory company and the American Dance Festival, to name only two) and the mild climate make the Research Triangle one of the most attractive locations in the country. Through a cooperative arrangement, students at any one of the three Triangle universities are free to take courses and use the academic facilities at any of the others. Many of our sociology graduate students take courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (8 miles away) under this arrangement.