Messy to ready data with OpenRefine

This workshop is designed for departments, labs, and research groups who work with messy survey or field data and want a faster, more reproducible cleaning process. The session introduces participants to OpenRefine and walks them through practical tasks researchers face every day: identifying inconsistencies, resolving typos with clustering, converting text into proper dates and numbers, cleaning multi-value fields, and exporting a fully documented, analysis-ready dataset.

It has been successfully delivered in the Agricultural Economics department, where graduate students worked through a real-world dataset and left with a clean file and an exportable record of every step taken. The workshop focuses on concrete outcomes: improving data quality, reducing manual cleaning time, and building confidence in preparing datasets for statistical analysis. Departments and labs across Purdue can request this session and have it customized to their specific data and research needs.