Introduction to OpenRefine


 Table of contents

February 14, 2023, 3:00-4:20pm EST

Presented by: Meghan Landry

Duration: 80 minutes

Description: This Data Carpentry adapted lesson introduces people working in Humanities, Social Sciences, and library- and information-related roles to working with data in OpenRefine. OpenRefine can be used to standardize and clean data across your file, and is most useful when working with a comma separated values file (csv) or a tab delimited file (tsv). It can help you get an overview of a data set; resolve inconsistencies in a data set; help you split data up into more granular parts; and more. At the conclusion of the lesson you will understand what the OpenRefine software does and how to use the OpenRefine software to work with data files. No previous experience with OpenRefine is required.

Technical requirements: Participants will need to install Java and OpenRefine on their computer. Setup instructions can be found in a section below and will be provided by email prior to the series.

Register here

Le même séminaire en français.

Biography

Meghan Landry is the Humanities & Social Sciences Research Specialist with ACENET, and one of the Alliance HSS National Team Leads. She possesses an MLIS from McGill University, a BA in English Literature from UPEI, and is working towards a Technical Writing certification. She joined ACENET from St. Francis Xavier University where she was a Scholarly Communications Librarian. In that role, she was very involved with the university’s strategic efforts in research data management and open access. She was responsible for implementing St. FX’s first institutional repository, StFX Scholar. Meghan is based at StFX University, but serves all of Atlantic Canada and is active in national humanities and social sciences initiatives.

Setup instructions

The below instructions come from Data Carpentry: OpenRefine for Social Science Data.

Installation

  1. Download OpenRefine here
  2. If Java is not embedded in the OpenRefine installer, you will need to install this dependency.
  3. Install OpenRefine by following instructions here.

You may ask for help on Slack if you are having any problem with these installation steps.

Data

For this workshop, we will use the following CSV file: SAFI_openrefine.csv.

  • Note carefully where you save this file on your computer, because we will use it in OpenRefine at the beginning of the workshop.
  • About the data: it is a part of the Data Carpentry workshop. It is a teaching version, which is in fact a subset of the Studying African Farmer-Led Irrigation (SAFI) database that has been intentionally messed up for the tutorial.