Working with Messy Data in OpenRefine

In an ideal world, any data you collect or obtain would be clean and formatted perfectly for analysis and visualization. But the reality is that data can be really messy! Cleaning and reformatting your data can be a time-consuming and tedious task, but there are ways to speed things up and automate repetitive tasks. OpenRefine can help!

This workshop will provide an introduction to OpenRefine, a powerful open source tool for exploring, cleaning and manipulating “messy” data. Through hands-on activities, using a variety of datasets, participants will learn how to:

• Explore and identify patterns in data
• Normalize data using facets and clusters
• Manipulate and generate new textual and numeric data
• Transform and reshape datasets
• Use the General Regular Expression Language (GREL) to undertake advanced manipulations
• Use APIs to augment existing datasets

Location: Robarts Library, 5th Floor. Map & Data Library Computer Lab