About Us

What is Bigfoot Sightings Data Insights?

This site presents DSCI 550 student work on the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) sightings dataset. Across three assignments, teams enriched Bigfoot encounter reports with geospatial, environmental, temporal, and multimodal features, then turned that data into interactive browser-based D3 visualizations.

The first assignment asked students to augment the BFRO dataset with derived fields and at least three additional public datasets (weather, terrain, moon phase, population density). The second assignment added GeoTopicParser, SpaCy named entities, AI-generated imagery, image captions, and object-recognition features. The third assignment asked teams to build D3 mini-sites and explore MEMEX ImageSpace, ImageCat, GeoParser, and Solr/ElasticSearch workflows.

Extraction & Enrichment

Students derived geospatial, environmental, moon-phase, witness-count, evidence, and temporal features from BFRO encounter reports spanning decades of sightings across the US.

Interactive Visualizer

Team mini-sites use D3 to explore sighting geography, moon-phase correlations, witness language patterns, proximity to geographic features, and temporal trends.

Publicizer

The gallery preserves student data science work as a static IRDS site deployable under the USC Data Science pages and browsable without a server.

Student Visualization Teams

Vu L. Nguyen — Spring 2024

Five D3.js visualizations on BFRO sightings data: a US geographical distribution map, sightings-by-moon-phase temporal chart, witness report word cloud, Mapbox proximity heatmap, and a treemap of witness counts by region and category.

View Visualizations GitHub

Know of another DSCI 550 Bigfoot visualization project? Contact the IRDS group to have it added.

Dataset & Tools

The class used the BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization) sightings dataset, containing thousands of reported Bigfoot encounters across North America with location, date, classification, and witness description fields. Students further enriched the data with moon phase, weather, terrain elevation, and population-density features from additional public APIs and datasets.

BFRO Dataset on Kaggle Browse Visualizations

USC Data Science Partner Sites

IRDS

The Information Retrieval and Data Science Group's mission is to research and develop open source software to analyze, ingest, process, and manage Big Data and turn it into information.

Visit IRDS

Related DSCI 550 Sites

Explore other USC DSCI 550 data visualization archives: UFO sightings, haunted places, Pixstory social media analysis, and phishing email datasets — all built by USC students using the same IRDS data science pipeline.

UFO Haunted Pixstory Phishing

Credits

Dr. Chris Mattmann — Visit his website

DSCI 550 Spring 2024 Class — Bigfoot web data visualization assignment

Visualizations by: Vu L. Nguyen (Spring 2024)