The SSCC is Now the Social Science Computing Core
It’s official: the SSCC is now the Social Science Computing Core, a suite of research computing services provided by College of Letters & Science Information Technology Services (L&S ITS). And if you didn’t notice any differences, that’s by design. Most SSCC services will be completely unaffected, and you don’t need to do anything differently.
You will notice some changes in the coming weeks. Email from the Help Desk will look different when we switch to L&S ITS’s ticketing system. You’ll start getting responses from new people as the ITS Service Desk learns to answer questions about SSCC services. But continue to send email to helpdesk@ssc.wisc.edu or leave voicemail at 608-262-9917.
Most SSCC users can stop reading here, but if you want to know more about how this affects the SSCC’s staff, read on.
Caitlin Tefft is now in a temporary position with the L&S ITS Service Desk, helping them learn to support SSCC services. But she’s also available for consulting and teaching workshops on qualitative analysis.
Cody Gerhartz and Ryan St. Peters are now part of ITS’s new Desktop Support Team 2. They are still the primary endpoint support providers for the Sewell Social Sciences Building and UWSC, but they will help and be helped by the rest of Team 2, which covers the LaFollette Institute, Helen C. White, and more. They also continue to do their other work for the SSCC just like before. For example, Ryan is still the point person for SSCC instructional support.
Ryan Horrisberger, Zach Heise, Dan Bongert, and David Thompson are now the ITS Systems Engineering and Operations (SEO) team. In the coming weeks and months, more L&S system engineers will be moved to the SEO team. The SEO team will provide the SSCC’s servers and other research computing infrastructure just like before. It will also create and support other services for the College.
Andy Arnold, Russell Dimond, and Jason Struck constitute the ITS SSCC team. The SSCC team oversees the SSCC’s research services (in close collaboration with the leaders of the SEO team and the other teams that now contain members of the former Cooperative’s staff). It also provides statistical consulting and research computing facilitation, just like before.
In short, the staff of the former Social Science Computing Cooperative are mostly doing the same things they did last week, just as part of a larger organization.
SSCC Training
There are still a few workshops left in the SSCC’s spring training schedule, including some Stata topics, NVivo, MAXQDA, and learning to use the SSCC’s Linux servers. For details and to register visit the SSCC’s training page. Our core R, Stata, and Python workshops will be taught next in the summer.
Winter Tech Update
The software on the SSCC’s servers was updated shortly before the start of the semester. If you’ve run into problems with R code that used to work, reinstall any packages you installed previously. If you’ve run into problems with Python code that used to work, start using conda.
ResearchDrive: Be Careful What You Ask For
If you are a faculty member requesting ResearchDrive space, the form asks if you work with sensitive or restricted data. You should only check those boxes if you currently have sensitive or restricted data–the kind of data that needs to go in Silo–and plan to put it in your ResearchDrive space. If you do check those boxes, you’ll be given space in Restricted ResearchDrive rather than regular ResearchDrive. Restricted ResearchDrive can only be accessed by specially authorized computers with Silo-like security. (Accessing Restricted ResearchDrive from Silo is currently being beta tested. Recall that we recently added read-only access to regular ResearchDrive from Silo; Restricted ResearchDrive access will be read and write.)
In short, if you check the boxes that say you work with sensitive or restricted data, you’ll get ResearchDrive space you most likely can’t use unless you already work in Silo. Worse, it often takes weeks to get that changed by the ResearchDrive team. Don’t do it!