Data can be used to question, inform, and shape your perspective. It can be mined from historical documents, scanned images, government datasets and cultural organisation records. Application Programming Interfaces (API) provide data in a form that computers can understand, and allow us to build new tools and interfaces. CSV files can be uploaded and explored at websites like WTFCSV at https://www.databasic.io/en/wtfcsv/. It’s nice to see my csv collection data file analysed in different ways and gives me instant graphics to use for proposals and reports.
Trove Harvester uses API to save data about newspaper articles to a CSV file for further analysis. This certainly looks like something to explore later on. Cleaning up datasets has certainly been a job I’ve had to do before and normally I ask for help. Finding out about OpenRefine has been useful and I look forward to using it to clear out blank cells, duplicate entries, and typing errors. Unfortunately, the tutorial links in the lesson outline were not working so I was unable to explore very far.
