Before doing the OpenRefine tutorial, I didn’t really understand the importance organizing data. I thought data analysts just organize data to organize. However, I now realize that cleaning up data sets the foundation of the data analysis and research that follows. OpenRefine is a useful tool to not only sets a standard for organizing data, but also provides a function for analysis. In particular, OpenRefine would be extremely helpful in sorting through the Nixon dataset, which contains 20K+ rows of data. The merging and resorting tool would be very useful in deciphering the frequency in which the ex-president had talked to or talked about. OpenRefine’s selection tool also allows us to select only the columns and rows that are relevant to our groups’ focus. Consistent capitalization of the data also allows the data to stay together during categorization. One feature that would be useful is to calculate the time of each conversation by subtracting the adjacent audio clips and adding it to another field. I’m not sure if there’s already a function for this but it would definitely be useful to see how the time of each conversation correlates to other criteria.