Academic Computing Social Science Resources

Software

We have a wide variety of specialized software available for faculty to use in their teaching and research.

For a list of standard software installed in the labs and faculty office machines see this page maintained by Technical Services.

Blackboard is Trinity's web based course management system. You can put your syllabus and course readings online as well as use the discussion board and email features to compliment your in-class instruction. Let us know if we can help you make use of this powerful tool or if you just want to know more about it.

Statistical Applications

SPSS is available on all public lab machines both Windows and Macintosh and can be installed on faculty office machines on request.

SAS is available for faculty office machines by request as well as student personal machines. It is not installed on lab machines but can be used from the class software network space.

SATA is installed on all public Windows machines and can be installed on faculty office machines on request. It is also available for students to install on their personal machines from the class software network space.

TSP is installed on the UNIX server shakti so it is accessible from just about anywhere. It is used for time series analysis in econometrics.

Geographic Information Systems - GIS (Windows only)

These programs allow users to use display data in a variety of ways using maps. Faculty have used these programs to map data such as crime information from the Hartford Police Department, Soil samples taken from the Trinity College Field Station in Ashland, and information on local school districts. Any data that contains geographic information such as address, zip code, longitude and latitude, or census block group (to name just a few) can be mapped.

ArcView is becoming the standard on campus and can be installed on office machines upon request. (Supported by the Resource Specialist for the Natural Sciences)

MapInfo is still available on all lab machines as well as faculty machines on request. MapInfo is being phased out in favor of ArcView.

Graphic Software

Photoshop is the leading image editing software and it is available on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. This software is used for more advanced image editing features. If all you need to do is crop or rotate a picture this is overkill but if you want to tweak the saturation and colors or modify an image this is the software to do it. Photoshop is installed in the public labs and available for faculty office machines on request.

ImageAXS is an image database program available for both Windows and Macintosh machines. This software is useful for cataloging large numbers of pictures and assigning keywords and descriptions. These fields are searchable and can contain any information you wish to attach to each image. The program presents each image collection as a page of thumbnails which when clicked reveal the full size image which the user can zoom in on to see the smallest details.

Miscellaneous Programs

Endnote is a program designed to help organize and collect bibliographic information. You can search various library resources from within the program and then pull the reference information for the books or articles you find directly onto your computer. EndNote integrates well with Microsoft Word and WordPerfect so you can make footnote, endnote, or bibliographic entries by automatically pulling the data from your endnote library and it will be inserted in the format of your choosing.

Adobe Acrobat is the program that allows you to create pdf files which are ubiquitous on the web. PDF stands for portable document format. Most everyone who has spent any time surfing the web has encountered pdf files and you have probably used the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to read them. This application will allow you to view the files but not edit them. To edit or create a pdf file you need the full version of Acrobat. Acrobat also has a feature that will allow you to capture text from a pdf file so that it can be edited in a word processor such as Microsoft Word. If you just need to create a pdf file from a paper copy you are better off using the Digital Senders on campus – talk to your resource specialist for more information.

Dreamweaver is web authoring software from Macromedia. It is a professional level application that allows the user full control over their web page design and html coding. If you have used FrontPage to design a web but want a more powerful tool or want to designing a page using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor on a Macintosh you may want to look into Dreamweaver. This software is a bit more complicated to use than FrontPage but is worth it for those wanting more control over the details of writing a web page. It is installed in the Windows and Macintosh labs.