OpenRefine Lessons for Digital Humanities

Importing data into OpenRefine

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min
Questions
  • How do I get data into OpenRefine?
Objectives
  • Successfully import data into OpenRefine

Importing data

Exercise 1: Create your first Open Refine project (using provided data)

There are several options for getting your data set into OpenRefine. You can upload or import files in a variety of formats including:

To import the data for the exercises below, run OpenRefine and:

The next screen gives you some options to ensure that the data gets imported into OpenRefine correctly. The options vary depending on the type of data you are importing.

In this case you need to:

Note that you can specify the number of rows to load, and gives you the ability to discard any number of initial rows.

Once you are happy click ‘Create Project »’

This will create the project and open it for you. Projects are saved as you work on them, there is no need to save copies as you go along.

To open an existing project in OpenRefine you can click ‘Open Project’ from the main OpenRefine screen (in the lefthand menu). When you click this, you will see a list of the existing projects and can click on a project’s name to open it.

Going Further

Key Points