On March 8, 2019, the Alwaleed Program held a hands-on workshop organized by Workshop Coordinator Johannes Makar (Ph.D. student, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) and run by digital humanities experts, Cole Crawford and Rashmi Singhal of Digital Arts and Humanities (DARTH) and Jeremy Guillette of the History Department, specifically for Islamic Studies researchers. Students, faculty and visiting fellows with varying levels of experience with digital scholarship learned about the benefits of using spreadsheets in their work and practiced cleaning up and manipulating data in Microsoft Excel and OpenRefine. Jeremy Guillette also demonstrated uses for Tableau, a powerful tool for data visualization.
The Research Methods in Islamic Studies Workshop takes place each semester to support scholarship on Islam and Muslim societies at Harvard. If you have ideas for how the Alwaleed Program can support your Islamic Studies research, please contact Johannes Makar at jmakar@g.harvard.edu.
Summary: In this workshop, 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.
Contact: Please RSVP at bit.ly/AISP-2019 and contact Johannes Makar, Workshop Coordinator, with any questions at jmakar@g.harvard.edu.