Since most of our data (Nixon recordings) is contained in a single 20k+ record Excel spreadsheet, OpenRefine would be an excellent tool to sift through the plethora of records.
Our main focus with the recordings is assessing and analyzing how certain cabinet members or politicians affected the direction or emotional content of specific situations. OpenRefine would allow us to cluster these records based on common conversation members as well as location.
In order to do this, we would need to use the cluster operation. However, we are also interested in parsing descriptions and clustering those. Since the descriptions are all unique, but vary only by a couple different details such as date and time, I would be interested in finding a “Similar” operation that could cluster records that are similar enough. Obviously, this is a very subjective operation that might not even be accurate enough if it was available. Still, it would be an interesting thing to explore.