OpenRefine – Cleaning and Transforming Messy Data

This slides belong to a hands-on session that introduces OpenRefine, a powerful, free, and open-source tool for exploring, cleaning, and transforming messy data. Working step by step with a real dataset, participants learn how to examine data, correct and standardize inconsistent values, and transform it efficiently to make it ready for analysis. The session emphasizes transparency and reproducibility, showing how every step can be reviewed, shared, and reused. By the end, participants will be confident using OpenRefine to turn raw data into a structured and reliable dataset suitable for further analysis across a range of research contexts. This event was part of the Data Days Lower Saxony 2025 - Virtual Theme Day. The event is organized by the Lower Saxony Research Data Management Initiative (FDM-NDS). FDM-NDS is a joint project under the umbrella of Hochschule.digital Niedersachsen and is funded by zukunft.niedersachsen, a funding program of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK) and the Volkswagen Foundation.