How to proceed

Coming to the end of this tutorial, we give some suggestions on how to view, analyse and process the datasets found. The suggestions are very general, as ultimately your choices will largely be determined by your specific field and educational goal.


View

Txt files contain "plain text". They can be viewed in any "plain" text editor, such as NotePad and Notepad, among others. If you want to compare several text files, e.g. on style features, the programme AntConc is suitable.

Csv and tsv files contain tabular data, which can be viewed in Excel with an intermediate step, demonstrated in the next video:

 

"How to convert txt file to csv or excel file" by Krishna Ojha, 2020 https://youtu.be/d9i2nBhg3aM

Analyse

Files in both csv and tsv format can be read in OpenRefine (free). That programme is useful for those without programming knowledge and is suitable for analysis tasks, such as displaying frequency of unique values. OpenRefine can also be used to enrich the data with data from other sources.

The next video demonstrates the use of OpenRefine.

"OpenRefine demo" by Henaramay, 2020 https://youtu.be/yjLIRNpc2RQ

Processing

More advanced analysis, processing, manipulation and visualisation of the data requires programming knowledge and a programming environment, e.g. Python Pandas. This is beyond the scope of what we cover here.
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Thanks

You are at the end of the tutorial.
Thanks for your participation and best of luck in finding and using open data in your teaching.

Any comments, suggestions or questions? You can contact Alice Doek.