Owen Stephens (Open University) has written a post sharing the materials for his British Library course, Working with Data. The course is part of the Digital Scholarship Training Programme aimed at cross-training British Library staff. The program’s offerings are “designed to be introductory and are aimed at ‘Intelligent Novices’, that is, colleagues who have heard about the concepts but haven’t had the time, space or opportunity to really explore them in depth.”
The course was designed to run in a 6 hour day, including two 15 minute coffee breaks and a one hour lunch break. The focus of the day is very much using OpenRefine to work with data, with a very brief consideration of other tools and their strengths and weaknesses towards the end of the day.
Participants are asked to bring ‘messy data’ from their own work to the day, and one session focusses on looking at this data with the instructor, working out how OpenRefine, or other tools, might be used to work with the data.
Stephens has shared a slidedeck, a handout, and a sample data file alongside the schedule for the day-long class.
