Workshops and Webinars

After you have collected and organized some data, one of the next steps is preparing the data for analysis. Some of this involves "data cleaning," where errors in the data are identified and corrected or formatting made consistent. OpenRefine is a powerful free and open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it and transforming it from one format into another. This hands-on lesson will teach you to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format data and automatically track any changes that you make.

Researchers often end up collecting and working with data in spreadsheets, and tend to organize that data in ways that make sense to them. In order to use tools for efficient computation and visualization of data, it is important to structure the data in ways that computers best understand it. In this hands-on lesson, you will learn: Good data entry practices - formatting data tables in spreadsheets, how to avoid common formatting mistakes, approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets, basic quality control and data manipulation in spreadsheets, and exporting data to other formats.

This workshop will help you kick your project off right by considering the "nuts & bolts" of how you will manage your data, file naming, folder structures, readmes, and how your datasets relate to each other. By the end of this session, you should be able to: understand file naming best practices, understand file/directory organization best practices, be able to write a readme file with necessary elements, and understand different formats for organizing data, e.g. spreadsheets, flat files, and databases.

The University Libraries host two digital repositories that support teaching and research at MU. The MOspace Institutional Repository includes faculty and student papers and presentations, and MU theses and dissertations. The MOspace Digital Library includes digital facsimiles of rare and special materials in the University Libraries. Learn more about these resources and how you can contribute your own content to them.

You create large amounts of digital content. What happens to that content after its creation? Will it be discoverable next year? In five years? Personal Digital Archiving provides a set of best practices for scholars to preserve and manage their content long after it has been created.

Would you like us to present a workshop or webinar on a topic not listed here? Fill out our Workshop / Webinar Request Form and let us know what you have in mind!