Cyberinfrastructure = Hardware + Software + Bandwidth + People

Cyberinfrastructure = Hardware + Software + Bandwidth + People

This week I was really not sure what I could write about, but then I came across Michael Roy's article in the Academic Commons that discussed the idea of cyberinfrastructure and building a computer research center at Northeastern University. I'm still working out my own ideas of what a cyberinfrastructure exactly is and this article featured a graspable array of issues and ideas that make up the necessity of establishing an infrastructure for research.

Roy begins his article by stating that computers were once thought to be for research, but then they became known to be teaching aids, but now the pendulum is swinging back to the idea that computers are used for research. He divides his article up into three parts that each address particular areas of establishing a IT research center: the practical issues, such as equipment, servers, staffing, the politics and the process and then the academic research process.

The first section elaborates on how Northeastern University decided to establish a Computer Research center. A committee was created and they interviewed the faculty to see what kind of research projects were currently being done and also asked about future projects to gain a picture of research needs. They decided at the end to build a cluster with features that focused on job management, size and interactvity. Then they had to set up a proposal to find the vendors that would be able to provide Northeastern with the technological equipment needed.

Needless to say, the IT Computer Research Center unleashed a series of critiques and skepticism amongst the faculty and within the academic world (mainly from the liberal arts world, predictably); however Leslie Hitch, Director of Academic Technology at Northeastern University, pointed out that Northeastern had a made an organizational goal to increase the quanity and quality of faculty research and the establishment of the Computing Research Center fell within the parameters of the university's mission. Then Roy began to discuss some of the challenges that they've had: staffing--how to staff the computing center, how much control to allow for, what defines productivity and so on.

Essentially, this article was useful for me to read because it provided some kind of framework of an individual institution's efforts to bank on digital research and clearly outlined some of the challenges we continue to have with defining the parameters of computing research and exactly what to do with it.