Join the Edinburgh Local Group for their third event of the year!
This session explores how statistics help us understand social inequalities, global cultural patterns, and climate challenges, showing both the power of data and the limits of what it can reveal. We'll be joined by Roxanne Connelly, Pauline Ward and Tod Van Gunten, each giving a short presentation on their work and research with time for questions after each talk.
Roxanne Connelly, Senior Lecturer of Sociology and Quantitative Methods
School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh
“Data Drought or Data Desert? The Challenge(s) of Studying Educational Inequalities in Scotland”
Scotland has a strong historical commitment to education, and the principle that education should be accessible to all, not just the wealthy, is epitomised by the commitment to free university tuition. However, Scotland is also a country where primary and secondary schools are facing intense financial pressures and complex teacher recruitment challenges. Closing the educational attainment gap was once the government’s defining mission but this ambition has arguably been quietly moved to the back burner. In this presentation, I will consider what we know about the nature of social class inequalities in educational attainment in Scotland, what we could learn from the nature of educational statistics in other nations, and what remains unknown in Scotland due to a lack of accessible data. This talk will closely follow the 2026 Scottish Parliament Election, at which point we might reflect on whether Scotland’s data drought is likely to solidify into an era of data desertification.
Pauline Ward, Data 4 Climate Action Edinburgh
“Statistics for climate action in the community, in Edinburgh with D4CAE”
D4CAE is a group of volunteers, providing support on all aspects of working with data to voluntary climate action groups in Edinburgh. Through social media, we advertise the support we provide, recruit new volunteers and raise awareness of climate impacts and climate action. Small data, rather than Big Data, is our stock-in-trade. In this talk, I'll describe how our user-driven projects have involved carbon footprinting and data visualisation. I'll also explain how our annual report provides basic statistical analysis and commentary on climate impacts and climate action relating to the city.
Tod Van Gunten, Senior Lecturer
School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh
“Cultural globalisation and music streaming”
This talk will address the question: why do some songs “go global,” reaching international audiences and achieving stream counts in the billions, while most songs achieve much more modest success? Drawing on daily rankings data from Spotify for 68 countries between 2017 and 2021, the presentation will explore how processes of cumulative advantage (‘the rich gets richer’) and changing global genre taste influence global success. Results suggests that the advantage enjoyed by North American and Western European artists in the global digital music market are substantially explained by these processes.
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