The Digital Research Commons (DRC) is a lab located on the second floor of M.D. Anderson Library (room 266-C) that exists to support researchers and research teams undertaking interdisciplinary work. It is reserved for individuals, project teams, and classes that rely on the specialized equipment, software, and expertise provided in the lab.

The DRC welcomes appointment requests from researchers, instructors, and teams of all sizes. Please contact Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Head of Research Services, to book an appointment.

Any UH community member may request an appointment to use the following specialized DRC equipment or software:

• Fully equipped podcast recording studio with Audacity software
• 2 professional-grade Wacom drawing tablets
• Visualization station and wall of 6 flatscreen monitors
• Two high-powered PCs
• One Mac Pro
• One portable 65” TV with PC and Mac inputs

Available software:

• ABBYY Fine Reader (OCR software)
• Anaconda Navigator (data science toolkit)
• ArcGIS Online (Mapping & geospatial analysis)
• Audacity (audio file editor)
• Gephi (graph & network visualizations)
• Google Earth Pro (3D & GIS data)
• Jupyter Notebook (data science & coding environment)
• NVivo (qualitative data analysis)
• OpenRefine (data cleaning)
• Python (3.9)
• R (4.1) & RStudio
• Spyder (python environment)
• Tableau Public (data visualization)
• Zotero (collect, organize, cite, & share research)

The entire UH community can also access additional research software in the DRC or remotely through the Libraries’ VMware Horizon Client. A full list of available software can be found here.

For research consultations with DRC staff, please see the DRC services webpage and contact our staff individually or write drc@uh.edu.