Cleaning and Exploring Your Data With Open Refine

Cleaning and Exploring Your Data With Open Refine

Mason
Ingrid

Intersect Australia, Australia
ingrid@intersect.org.au

2014-12-19T13:50:00Z

Paul Arthur, University of Western Sidney

Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW 2751
Australia
Paul Arthur

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Pre-Conference Workshop and Tutorial (Round 2)

Data processing
Data normalisation
APIs
Open Refine

databases & dbms
English

This three-hour workshop introduces participants to Open Refine, which is a powerful tool for cleaning, normalization, and exploration of datasets. In this tutorial we’ll work through the various features of Refine, including importing data, faceting, clustering, and calling into remote APIs, by working on a fictional but plausible humanities research project.

Contact Information

Ingrid Mason (on behalf of Intersect Australia, tutorial instructors TBC)
ingrid.mason@intersect.org.au http://intersect.org.au/contact
Research Interests
eResearch, digital humanities

Area of Expertise

The eResearch analysts and software developers at Intersect Australia deliver training and tutorials to support uptake of ubiquitous and domain-specific technologies employed in data-intensive research. This training is regularly delivered to academics and higher degree students in its member universities in Australia. A common area of expertise shared across the team is data, information and technology management, informatics and data modelling, through to technical evaluation and software engineering to enable the development, application, and uptake of technologies in support of research.

Target Audience

Attendees accustomed to using ubiquitous tools on their desktop computer, e.g., Excel, and interested in building up further skills to process their data. Mastering tasks such as
• Cleaning up messy data: If you have a text file with semi-structured data, you can edit it using facets, transformations, and clustering to make the data cleanly structured.
• Transformation of data: Converting data to different formats, normalising and the de-normalising of data.
• Parsing of data from websites: Open Refine contains a URL fetch feature.
• Adding data to your dataset by fetching it from web services with json: A good example of this is used for geocoding addresses to geographic coordinates.

Participant Number

30 participants

Technical Requirements

Attendees bring a laptop they have administration access to (able to download software) and robust wireless must be available.

Course Outline

Open Refine is a powerful free tool for exploring, normalizing, and cleaning up datasets. In this 2.5-hour tutorial we’ll work through the various features of Refine, including importing data, faceting, clustering, and calling into remote APIs, by working on a fictional but plausible humanities research project. We will start with a research question in mind and use the features of Refine to gain insights and to find answers. The research question relates to NSW police stations—finding out what we can about where they are located, their heritage status, and the kinds of archival records that State Records NSW holds on them. During this course you will be shown how to get map coordinates by creating direct batch queries to Google Maps.
Participants will learn
• How to install Open Refine.
• How to create a project.
• How to organise your data.
• Ways to explore your data.
• How to work with APIs.
• How to export a dataset.
For more information, see http://intersect.org.au/course-resources.