In order to begin thinking about digital methods, scholars must first make the conceptual leap toward thinking about their research as data. How do we get at the data in our research and how do we make it useful and usable by machines? What are some of the promises (and perils) of reframing research as data? By the end of the session, we’ll be introduced to strategies and tools for taking very different kinds of information and creating well-formed data, data that can then be used for analysis or visualization.
By way of introduction to working with data, we are going to focus on a) conceptually how data is structured using the tidy data framework and b) practically speaking, how to make it useable by other humans and machines with the program OpenRefine.
In this session, we will:
- install and become familiar with some of OpenRefine's features
- import and export derivative datasets
- sort, filter, and facet data
- fix errors and inconsistencies at scale
- split columns with multiple values
- introduce regular expressions
Deduplicating Rows (Won't be covered in this session, but feel free to explore on your own)
OpenRefine Introductory Video Tutorials
Programming Historian's Cleaning Data with OpenRefine
Session Leaders: Anna Lacy and James Truitt
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