OpenRefine is an easy to use more intelligent excel tool which lets you conduct complex operations with higher end programming. The capability to analyze groups of data makes it a very powerful tool for the data set which I am studying. I am studying cylinder recordings from the early 1900’s. This collection will need grouping by genre, place of recording, time of recording etc. This allows for visualization of recordings and creates useful insight into the predominant aspects of culture at the time. It also gives us a snippet to compare with the complexity of audio recordings out there today. It gives us the tools to be able to analyze and compare the number of audio recordings in a certain category in the 1900’s versus today and see if the trend of what was most popular to be recorded in those times continues today.
It would be great to be able to be able to tie audio recordings to certain data via links. However this would be complicated to do as each row would require it’s on unique hyperlink. I would need to know how to extract hyperlinks for recordings from the original archive and then insert them via an ordered file/list into the data set.
Overall however, this tool helps greatly with analysis of the large groups of data we are presented via our data sets.