Data Cleaning with OpenRefine

University of Utah

Date: October 24 2024

Time: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm MDT

Location: Digital Matters - MLIB 2751

Instructors: Kaylee Alexander, Madison Golden

Registration: Use this link to sign up for this workshop.

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General Information

What: Before you can analyze data you need to clean it. Data cleaning identifies errors and corrects formatting to create consistent data. This step must be taken with extreme care and attention because without clean data the results of analysis may be false and non-reproducible.

OpenRefine is a powerful free and open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it and transforming it from one format into another.

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

Who: The course is aimed at graduate students, postdocs, staff, faculty, and other researchers across campus who are interested in learning how to use OpenRefine for data cleaning. You do not need to have coding experience or any previous knowledge of OpenRefine to attend this workshop.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop onto which they can download OpenRefine. Please download OpenRefine before the workshop).

Contact: Please email andrew.george@hsc.utah.edu or rebecca.barter@hsc.utah.edu for more information.

Schedule

Note that the schedule below serves as a guideline. The start, end, and break times are fixed, but timing for of the each topics covered may vary as we may go faster or slower through the content.

Time Topic Carpentries Content
2:00 Summary and Setup https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/index.html
2:05 Introduction https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/01-getting-started.html
2:15 Importing Data to OpenRefine https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/02-importing-data.html
2:25 Exploring Data with OpenRefine https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/03-exploring-data.html
2:35 Transforming Data https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/04-transforming-data.html
2:45 Filtering and Sorting with OpenRefine https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/05-filter-exclude-sort.html
2:55 Reconciliation of Values https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/06-reconciliation.html
3:05 [BREAK]
3:15 Looking Up Data https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/07-looking-up-data.html
3:25 Exporting Data Cleaning Steps https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/08-exporting-cleaning-steps.html
3:35 Exporting and Saving Data from OpenRefine https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/09-exporting-data.html
3:45 Other Resources in OpenRefine https://datacarpentry.org/OpenRefine-ecology-lesson/10-resources.html