Hesburgh Libraries

Workshop Overview

A part of the data workflow is preparing the data for analysis. Some of this involves data cleaning, where errors in the data are identified and corrected, or formatting is made consistent. This step must be taken with the same care and attention to reproducibility as the analysis. OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful free and open-source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it and transforming it from one format into another.

This lesson will teach you to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format data and automatically track any changes that you make. Many people comment that this tool saves them months of work trying to make these edits by hand.

This lesson assumes no prior knowledge of the skills or tools.