LibGuides: OpenRefine, a Power Tool for Messy Data: Resources

Reference

Official Resources:

Recommended tutorials & examples:

Data Carpentry OpenRefine for Ecology
Lesson on data cleaning with an ecology data example.
Fetching and Parsing Data from the Web with OpenRefine
Programming Historian lesson featuring web APIs and manipulating text with GREL arrays.
OpenRefine Foundation, online course from RefinePro
Learn why data cleaning, preparation and enrichment take up an enormous amount of time, and is nevertheless a crucial stage in the data science methodology.
Practical Data Management Blog
Highlights Biology data example.
Tutorial from Enipedia
"This is a tutorial on using OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine), and has been developed to teach students in a statistics class how this tool can be used to clean up data." Uses university endowment data.
Tutorial from Heard Library (Vanderbilt)
Uses campaign donation data.
Tutorial from Programming Historian
Focuses on history data
Tutorial from ProPublica
Focuses on data journalism.
Tutorial from School of Data
Uses African hospital data.
Library Carpentry OpenRefine
Lesson introduces librarians to working with data in OpenRefine. At the conclusion of the lesson you will: understand what the OpenRefine software does; use the OpenRefine software to work with data files.

The Library regularly offers OpenRefine workshops. Check the Workshops schedule to find upcoming events.

Below are resources from past workshops:

Get Started with OpenRefine: Explore, Clean, and Transform your Data!
Workshop outline and video from March 2021
Clean Your Data: Getting Started with OpenRefine
Workshop outline and video from 2017.
OpenRefine: Advanced Data Transformation with GREL Expressions
Workshop outline delving into using GREL expressions in OpenRefine, introducing strategies and features to do advanced wrangling of your data.