This week’s blog post required us to learn how to use the program OpenRefine, which is useful for people to clean and manipulate datasets. We were required to clean a sample datasheet on shipwrecks off the New Jersey coast. After playing around with the OpenRefine, I realized how useful this program will be for my group’s dataset.
My group was give the datasheet for the Carnegie Museum of Contemporary Art. With so much data to comb through, OpenRefine will be a helpful tool to help us refine and clean up information that is not relevant to our research questions. We can remove columns that is not needed and reorganize columns into a more efficient system. We can also merge overlapping data. In addition, I hope that OpenRefine can help fill holes in our dataset to make it even more complete.