“Garbage in, garbage out” is often heard in just about any field that uses data. Regardless of which application will be analyzing, transforming, or exploring your data, a quick run through OpenRefine will greatly reduce the amount of garbage data going into your project. In addition to cleaning and standardizing your data, OpenRefine can add a great deal of value to your data by transforming text into URIs for use in Linked Open Data (LOD) applications.

This session will demonstrate how OpenRefine can clean messy data. Once the data has been cleaned, we’ll discuss reconciliation services and how you can use them to turn strings into things.

In fall 2015, I debuted a 2000-level class on Early Modern European History at UC Blue Ash. Because I wanted to do something different than the normal survey, I began to brainstorm ways I could incorporate the Digital Humanities into an otherwise ordinary classroom set-up, with students who would be, for better or worse, expecting that entirely ordinary classroom. In this session, I therefore propose to discuss the ways in which I brought DH into the course, including particular assignments, and I invite others to discuss their own ways they made an ordinary course suddenly unusual with the addition of new technological tools. Questions we’d consider together include what kind of assignments work best for this and how to handle student technological failures or challenges. (Because as we know, they will happen!)