Cole Crawford and Jeremy Guillette will be giving the next workshop in the Alwaleed Bin Talal Research Methods in Islamic Studies series. In "Tidy Data for Researchers: Or, How to Get Your Spreadsheets to Actually Tell You Something," researchers will learn how to organize, manipulate, and visualize their data. We will first focus on good data organization practices and use spreadsheets to tidy and wrangle several datasets. We will then manipulate, clean, and enhance our data in OpenRefine, a powerful tool for working with messy data. Finally, we will demonstrate how it is possible to visualize and understand clean data.

Requirements: attendees should bring laptops with Excel, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice installed; they should also install OpenRefine (http://openrefine.org/download.html) prior to the workshop.