OpenRefine Lessons for Librarians: Setup

Getting ready {.getready}

You need to download and install OpenRefine and download a data file to follow this lesson.

Downloading OpenRefine

You can download OpenRefine from http://openrefine.org/download.html. There are two versions you can use for this lesson:

Generally OpenRefine 2.6 is recommended.

There are versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Installing and Running OpenRefine

When you download OpenRefine for Windows or Linux from the address above, you are downloading a zip file. To install OpenRefine you simply unzip the downloaded file wherever you want to install the program. This can be to a personal directory or to an applications or software directory - OpenRefine should run wherever you put the unzipped folder. The location has to be a “local” drive as problems have been reported trying to run OpenRefine from a Network drive.

If you are downloading OpenRefine for Mac, you a re downloading a ‘dmg’ (disk image) file which you can open, and then drag the OpenRefine application to an appropriate folder on you computer.

OpenRefine is a java application, and you need to have a ‘java runtime environment’ (JRE) installed on your computer to run OpenRefine. If you don’t already have one installed then you can download and install from http://java.com by going to the site and clicking ‘Free Java Download’.

To run Refine:

The interface to OpenRefine is accessed via a web browser. When you run Refine normally this should open a window in your default web browser pointing at the address http://127.0.0.1:3333.If this doesn’t happen automatically you can open a web browser and type in this address.

Getting Help

If you encounter problems installing or running OpenRefine, a good source of support is the OpenRefine mailing list and forum

If you are installing OpenRefine on Windows, you may want to check the thread on Installing OpenRefine on Windows 7

There are also general and specialist tutorials about using OpenRefine available on the web, including:

Downloading the data

You need to download doaj-article-sample.csv. This is a csv file. Make a note of the location you save the file.