The Distortions and Realities of the Senate’s Constitutional Purpose: Setting the Record Straight on “Senate Exceptionalism”

Drawing on part of the argument from my recent book, The Senate: From White Supremacy to Government Gridlock (University of Virginia Press, 2021), I critique what I call “Senate exceptionalism:” the notion that the Senate is the framers’ particularly special or remarkable creation. I do so by contrasting the historical and constitutional distortions that support this institutional conceit with the realities of the founding and American political development. After reviewing the parallels between the ideas and tenets of American and Senate exceptionalism, I introduce four arguments from the book that undermine the basis of the Senate’s exceptionalism and in particular draw critical attention to the constitutional mythology surrounding and supporting the filibuster in the form of Senate Rule XXII and its three-fifths supermajority threshold for ending debate on many matters before the Senate.

Identifying Research Trends for Technology Use in Pre-School Curricula through Content and Bibliometric Analysis Methods

The aim of this study is to identify research trends for technology use in pre-school curricula. Research trends were analysed by employing content and bibliometric analysis methods. A total of 3,302 articles indexed by Web of Science between 1975 and 2020 were analysed using bibliometric mapping analysis and a total of 31 studies indexed by Web of Science between 2016-2020 were analysed using content analysis. The results obtained from the study reveal that the effect of technology is examined in different fields and with different stakeholder groups. It is identified that qualitative methods, interview/focus group interview forms, articles as document types and pre-school teachers among other sample groups were preferred more frequently. The country with the highest number of citations is identified as the United States of America and the organisation with the highest number of citations is identified as University of Virginia. It is recommended that researchers design their studies by following the trends in the field and conduct studies that address the gaps in the field.

First person – Shekhar Saha

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Shekhar Saha is first author on ‘ The tumor-suppressive long noncoding RNA DRAIC inhibits protein translation and induces autophagy by activating AMPK’, published in JCS. Shekhar conducted the research described in this article while a Research Associate in Anindya Dutta's lab at University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. He is now a Research Scientist in the lab of Roger Abounader at the University of Virginia School of Medicine investigating the role of noncoding RNA in cancer biology.

Analyzing University of Virginia Health publications using open data, Python, and Streamlit

As part of a larger project to understand the publishing choices of UVA Health authors and support open access publishing, a team from the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library analyzed an open data set from Europe PMC, which includes metadata from PubMed records. We used the Europe PMC REST API to search for articles published in 2017–2020 with “University of Virginia” in the author affiliation field. Subsequently, we parsed the JSON metadata in Python and used Streamlit to create a data visualization from our public GitHub repository. At present, this shows the relative proportions of open access versus subscription-only articles published by UVA Health authors. Although subscription services like Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions allow users to do similar analyses, we believe this is a novel approach to doing this type of bibliometric research with open data and open source tools.

“A Book One Can with Complete Confidence Call Important”: Albert Erskine, Ralph Ellison, and the Publishing of Invisible Man

In this article I examine the editing and publishing of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by Albert Erskine. Over the course of the piece, I deploy letters, drafts, and other material drawn from both Ellison's archive in the Library of Congress and Erskine's own archive at the University of Virginia to unpack how Erskine, as a white editor at a powerful international publishing house, conceived of his role in shepherding to market and marketing what he saw as a major literary work by an African American author.

We Are Martinsville (WAM)

Rural communities in Virginia have experienced a decline caused by national economic trends. Formerly vibrant towns with rich histories and cultures increasingly suffer from a shrinking population and a lack of new investment, directly impacting the quality of life and services like education or health care. The loss of identity is a hindrance to innovative planning strategies and entrepreneurship. This paper reflects on an ongoing serious game effort developed by the University of Virginia and piloted in Martinsville, VA. That city’s once-vibrant community faces challenges like unemployment, opioid addiction, and obesity. We are Martinsville (WAM) recognizes Martinsville’s rich ties to its history and cultural assets, offering a digital tool in support of a creative placemaking strategy. WAM fosters community engagement while simultaneously increasing outdoor activities and allowing stakeholders to generate place-based game content. This paper describes the findings of the pilot project.