NADP Sightings Data

The North American Dogman Project (NADP) is a group dedicated to researching Dogman, a canine cryptid that walks upright. They have collected hundreds of sightings and host them on a map here.

This repository contains code for extracting and cleaning this dataset for further analysis. The dataset is hosted on data.world.

Setup

There is not an easy way to automate downloading the raw data, but it's a straightforward process.

1. Go to the Encounters page on the NADP website.
2. Click the "View larger map" icon in the top right corner of the map. A page hosted by Google will open.
3. On the information panel (left side) there's a "three dot" menu expansion at the top right. Click that and select "Download KML". Be sure to select "Export to a KML file", as the script needs to load the whole thing to parse it. It's about 375k.
4. Rename that file to north_american_dogman_sightings.kml and put it in data/external in this repo.

Once you've completed these steps you're ready to extract and process the sightings.

Extract and Process

1. Set up the conda environment.

conda env create -f env.yml

# source activate if you're not set up with the conda command.
conda activate nadp-sightings-data

2. Run make!

make data/processed/dogman_sightings.csv

You're done. The processed file is right where the makefile says it is.