The Vision of Linked Open Data: Martin Wong and the METRO Network

This post appears as part of my 8-month fellowship with the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), which ended in June 2017. My project was entitled “Interlinking Resources, Diversifying Representation: Linked Open Data in the METRO Community”. This particular post appears as a summation of my project research.

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Using OpenRefine to Reconcile Name Entities

BY KAREN H.

OpenRefine is a well-loved tool among information professionals for cleaning “messy” data, mostly tabular data (Excel, CSV, TSV), but also record data in serializations like XML. Do you have values in an Excel spreadsheet with unwanted whitespace? Or multiple spellings for the same term? Then OpenRefine might be just the tool for you. OpenRefine is flexible enough to handle script-writing or the writing of regular expressions to batch alter values any way you choose. And scripting can be used for other purposes, too, including calling outside APIs to align new data with what you have.

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Using Beautiful Soup with Python for Webscraping

BY KAREN H.

Topic(s):

  • Introduction to the process of webscraping, using Python and Beautiful Soup

Audience:

  • People who want to understand the process for extracting data from web pages, especially in situations when direct access to the backend database might not be possible;
  • People who program in Python and want to know more about the HTML parser Beautiful Soup;
  • Digital humanists, scientists, infographic designers, etc..

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