OpenRefine Workshop Post-mortem
11 December 2017
I ran the second QMED Computes workshop on December 6th, 2017. Topic: Cleaning up Messy Data with OpenRefine.
Attendees seemed to really love using OpenRefine – it’s easy to grok, and immediately clear how it will be useful.
For this workshop I had attendees follow the Data Carpentry lesson on OpenRefine, but threw in a few other questions of my own.
Here’s the workshop outline:
Notes for next time:
- Energy levels were good for the entire 2 hour session. I strongly suggested everyone get up after an hour and move around, which probably also helped.
- I showed the GoogleRefine videos right off the bat. Attendees said that was a useful overview.
- Most everyone was able to work through the tutorial on their own (or in pairs) with out much help from me.
- I occasionally jumped in to demonstrate more advanced features (e.g. reconciling, or scripting) just show what is possible.
- Most people did the discussion either on their own, or didn’t get to it. I should explicitly make time for discussion questions, and tell everyone ahead of time I’ll be doing that.