The new Voteview.com: preserving and continuing Keith Poole’s infrastructure for scholars,students and observers of Congress

For the last 40 years, Keith Poole has developed and curated a trove of basic data and measurements related to the United States Congress. He has made these resources freely available through his widely-used Voteview.com website since 1995. At Poole’s Voteview.com, scholars, students, journalists, and the broader public could download gold-standard historical and current roll-call voting data, member rosters, NOMINATE scores, and measures and visualizations of party cohesion and polarization, among many other useful things. In this article, we describe how we are preserving and continuing these vast public-goods contributions through the new Voteview.com. Developed and housed at UCLA, the new Voteview.com carries on the creation of basic roll-call data infrastructure, including the assignment of Poole’s widely-used ICPSR number-like identifiers to new members, data on every roll-call vote ever taken, NOMINATE scores and other standard roll-call vote-based measures such as party-loyalty scores. In addition to serving as a platform for the continuation and dissemination of this basic data infrastructure, the new Voteview.com also provides powerful tools for exploring the history of roll-call voting, the US Congress, and American politics and political history through a simple search interface and interactive visualizations.     

Between rock and a hard place: narrating nona hendryx's inscrutable career

Elaborating on the imperialist grasp of rockism, Kelefa Sanneh writes 'There's a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers—just so long as they, y'know, rock.' What's striking is how closely Nona Hendryx's career fits within these categories—doo-wop singer, disco queen, rocker—yet, she still hasn't received her due, even within that flawed, proverbial rockist Hall of Fame. Building on Mark Anthony Neal's rich analysis of the proto-disco trio LaBelle and their prophetic collaboration with singer/songwriter Laura Nyro in the early 1970s, this paper traces the lengthy and varied solo career of former-LaBelle, Nona Hendryx. My argument takes as a point of departure the challenge of telling a 'non-rockist' story about how Hendryx rocks, how she doesn't, and why issues of legibility and legacy rest on these questions. I investigate the consolidation of race, gender and genre in the formative period of the 1970s, when rock and disco were situated within popular media as warring sub-cultures. In particular, I track the ways that the purported artifice of disco and its associations with blackness, gayness and overtly performative, 'feminine' modes of display render Hendryx's later experimentation with other genres of music illegible, even to her most devoted fans.