Emeritus Professor, Durham University
Professor James ‘Jim’ Ridgway directs the SMART Centre -- see www.dur.ac.uk/smart.centre. They create novel interfaces to present multivariate data, and populate them with interesting data on topics such as educational attainment, sexually transmitted diseases, riots, drug and alcohol use by young people. Jim is particularly interested in public understanding of arguments that involve data, and statistical literacy. His current research focuses on reasoning with evidence, and data visualization. A collaboration with the House of Commons Library led to the development an interactive data visualisation that presented a huge amount of information at constituency level ahead of the 2015 General Election -- see http://www.constituencyexplorer.org.uk/. A current EU-funded project involves five countries in creating teaching materials at school and undergraduate levels that use data on inequality, migration, poverty and crime in a programme to develop statistically literacy -- see www.procivicstat.org
Other research interests include assessment and gender inequalities.