Blog Post 4: OpenRefine

I personally did not find OpenRefine to be as easy or intuitive to use as I anticipated, but it definitely seems to be a valuable tool for sorting through and making sense of data. My group’s dataset is the Carnegie Museum of Art’s photography collection, and we might manipulate our huge data set to answer questions regarding the authors, time periods, and subjects of the photos contained within the collection. For example, we have data on artist, date, medium, nationality, etc., and we could use OpenRefine to isolate records that share features such as nationality or medium, using the facet tool. OpenRefine can also help with data cleanup; for example, we could organize all data by year, to predict and find trends within the photography or its subjects/themes. Doing so will allow us to view how certain features of the photographs (time period, nationality/origin) affect other aspects such as the medium through which it was created. I would like to know how to manipulate and analyze data in the form of graphs, charts, etc. further.

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