Data Cleanup With OpenRefine
04/09/2019
12:00pm - 1:00pm

Have you ever found yourself with a data set that required some "cleaning up" before becoming useful? A database export with inconsistent date formats? A list of geographical locations in need of normalisation against an authority file? Doing these tasks in Excel can take a long time and lead to human error. OpenRefine is a powerful, spreadsheet-like tool that is built to automate precisely this kind of work. This hands-on session will introduce OpenRefine and get participants started on their own data clean-up project.

Learning Goals:

- Learn how to use OpenRefine to import, clean up and export data sets

- Learn how to use facets to explore a data set, e.g. for trends analysis

- Hands-on session. This will be a live session (no slides) demonstrating OpenRefine. Participants will be encouraged to follow along and try the software out for themselves.

About the Presenter:

Thomas Guignard works at the Ontario Colleges Library Service (OCLS) in Toronto. He also volunteers as an instructor with Software Carpentry and Library Carpentry, teaching basic computing skills to librarians and researchers to help them do more with less pain.