Introduction to OpenRefine for the Humanities and Social Sciences

This session will introduce participants to OpenRefine, a powerful, free and open source tool to work with large datasets. We will quickly work through how to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format tabular data while automatically tracking any changes.

This session is suitable for beginners with no prior knowledge of OpenRefine. There are no prerequisite coding skills. While the examples and data used will be aimed at the Humanities and Social Sciences community, the session is open to anyone and everyone interested in learning about OpenRefine.

Learning outcomes

Through this short introductory lesson, you will learn:

1. What OpenRefine is and when to use it;
2. How to create, import and export projects in OpenRefine;
3. How to use facets and clusters to identify typos and mistakes in your data;
4. How to edit and transform your data; and,
5. How to save your work and export your script.

Instructor: Maria Sigridur Finnsdottir, PhD

This lesson is an adaptation of the Data Carpentry course "OpenRefine for Social Science Data."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commerical Attribution 4.0 International License.