Messy Humanities Data? Data Wrangling with OpenRefine
Adrian Demleitner (Digital Humanities), Ursula Loosli (Humanities Data Steward)
Date: Tuesday, 10 November 2026, 1:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Place: Walter Benjamin Kolleg (Unitobler) and online
Spreadsheets with inconsistent spellings, duplicates, and typos are part of everyday research - whether in metadata corpora, historical source registers, or bibliographic lists. OpenRefine is a free, open-source tool developed specifically to deal with such data: to clean, standardise, and enrich it. The Coffee Lecture first situates the topic within the context of research data management, then demonstrates, with examples from the humanities, what OpenRefine can and cannot do.