OpenRefine training

[Owen Stephens]

I regularly deliver training on using OpenRefine, and I'm in the midst of re-writing and extending some of the material I use. With this in mind I thought I'd call on your collective wisdom as OpenRefine users and ask:

What things do you wish you’d known earlier about OpenRefine?

What things do you wish you could do or knew how to do with OpenRefine?

Any answers will be used to improve training materials or OpenRefine documentation (I always try to publish any training materials I write under an open license so they can be used by others)

Best wishes

Owen

[Isao Matsunami]

For me, It's clustering that I use OpenRefine instead of Excel for.

(And The ability of latest Excel to OCR is the big threat for OpenRefine)

2018年11月1日(木) 2:12 Owen Stephens <ow...@ostephens.com>:

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[Tom Morris]

I used to teach OpenRefine as part of the DST4L classes at Harvard. I suspect they've got the course materials archived somewhere, but, if not, I could probably dig them up if they'd be useful.

http://altbibl.io/dst4l/

http://www.dst4l.info/

Tom

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[Owen Stephens]

Thanks Tom - I found the materials - always interesting to see how others approach training.

For reference (for me and anyone else who is interested) the training materials & notes from the DST4L courses I found were:

Slides:

https://www.slideshare.net/tfmorris/openrefine-data-science-training-for-librarians

Notes (I think these were joint notes taken by participants during the session)

http://altbibl.io/dst4l/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Morris_Starting_OpenRefine.pdf

http://altbibl.io/dst4l/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/9-10-OpenRefine.pdf

Blog post and notes by Jennifer Prentice

http://altbibl.io/dst4l/getting-data-into-shape-with-openrefine/

http://altbibl.io/dst4l/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Notes-Week-7.pdf

The training materials I'm currently working from are a course I wrote originally for the British Library:

http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2014/11/working-with-data-using-openrefine/

and the Library Carpentry materials (which initially evolved from the ones I wrote for the BL, but have been extended and improved through an amazing community effort since then)

https://librarycarpentry.github.io/lc-open-refine/

Owen

[Owen Stephens]

Thanks Isao

I'm not aware of the OCR abilities for the latest version of Excel - is there any demonstration/documentation you could point me at? It would be interesting to see what they are offering

Owen

[isao matsunami]

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/09/24/bringing-ai-to-excel-4-new-features-announced-today-at-ignite/

The only concern is security. Will people use it for sensitive documents?

However this is amazing.

2018/11/01 18:41、Owen Stephens <ow...@ostephens.com>のメール:

[Ettore Rizza]

Hello Isao,

I'm not sure this new Excel feature is a threat to OpenRefine. People who need to OCRise tables in documents already use tools like Abbyy Finereader (commercial) or Tabula (free). The latter could perhaps be integrated into OpenRefine if the need arose.

If we had to find a threat, it will come, I think, from tools that do pretty much the same thing as OpenRefine, but with a more modern and user-friendly GUI, like Workbench.

[Ettore Rizza]

Hello Owen,

A good indication of what people want to know is perhaps the list of most popular questions about OR in StackOverflow and in this Google Group. The two attached CSV files may be able to inspire you.

Ettore