A simple tutorial using Open Refine to prepare messy historical data to be mapped in Google Fusion tables.

Type of session: Play

Title: A simple tutorial using Open Refine to prepare messy historical data to be mapped in Google Fusion tables.

Name of session facilitator(s): Nora

Approximate duration: 1-2 hr

Skill level: All

Proposal:

I can walk through a short exercise we did for colleagues at British Library as part of our staff Digital Scholarship Training Programme showing how to use Open Refine to prepare messy historical data to be mapped. The dataset relates to our Canadian Photographs Collection. We’ll use OpenRefine to extract location names referenced in these image captions, and then Google Fusion Tables to find latitude/longitude and map the results. Participants are more than welcome to recommend/suggest/try other mapping tools with the data provided at their own pace as well and report back to the group!

Dataset: Picturing Canada Messy Data

Prerequisite: A laptop with OpenRefine installed. A Google account. A print out of Preparing your Data to be MappedRevised and a saved copy of GoogleSheetsGeocodeScript to cut and paste into Google Sheets.