Save Time Cleaning Your Data with OpenRefine

Date: October 22 2025

Presenter: Alexandra Wong and Rosa Orlandini

An important part of working with any data is properly preparing and cleaning your data, whether you have conducted a survey or have found secondary data! If you also find cleaning your data to correct errors or make formatting consistent to be a tedious and time-consuming (but very important) process, this workshop is for you. OpenRefine is a powerful, free and open-source tool for working with messy data. This workshop will teach you to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format data 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.

By the end of this hands-on workshop, participants will be able to:

• Understand the kinds of challenges presented by raw data
• Install and use the OpenRefine tool on your own computer
• Use several time-saving techniques to cluster, clean, and process your data

No previous experience working with OpenRefine is required, though a familiarity with data is helpful. This workshop will take place in Scott530 with the OpenRefine software already installed. To use their own device, participants are encouraged to download OpenRefine prior to the workshop.