Week 4, October 16: Data, part II – Working with Messy Data

Pre-class reading

• A Guide to Bulletproofing Your Data, by Jennifer LaFleur, 2013
• Avoiding Mistakes When Cleaning Your Data, by Noah Veltman, 2013
• Dollars for Docs Mints a Millionaire, by Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, 2013

What we’ll cover

• “Regular expressions”: find-and-replace on steroids.
• Using OpenRefine to clean and transform data.
• Fact-checking your data.

Post-class assignments

• Use regular expressions and/or OpenRefine to clean the dataset(s) you’ve chosen for your long-term project. Keep a log of the steps you took, and the decisions you made. If you’re certain your datasets don’t need cleaning, explain the steps you took to be sure.
• CodeCademy Web Fundamentals: CSS Selectors
• CodeCademy Web Fundamentals: JavaScript