Useless Press has obtained a dataset of ten years worth of official reports about decapitated animals discovered in New York City public parks.* We are pleased to announce an open call for projects that make use of this data in an innovative manner.

All types of projects will be accepted. For example:

• maps
• collections of charts or graphs
• interactive features
• works of fine art
• physical installations
• apps
• sound or music
• etc.

Submitted projects will be featured on the Useless Press website, and the winning project will receive a $50 honorarium.

To enter the competition, send project materials and a brief written description to contact@uselesspress.org by October 1st, 2015. Please note that sketches, concepts, and proof-of-concepts for are also welcome. If you have any questions at all please don't hesitate to send them to this same address.

The Dataset

You may download the dataset in the following formats:

• csv
• excel
• json
• sql
• mp3 (rows 1-22, read by Amelia Winger-Bearskin)

For clarifications regarding the coding scheme, see the codebook, which you can download here:

About the Data

The dataset consists of reports filed between 2004 and 2014 by New York City Parks Department employees related to the discovery of decapitated animals in New York City public parks. The discoveries range from goat heads to headless chickens to cats, dogs and apparently some sort of pig. (For more information on this phenomenon, you can read this New York Magazine story.) The data has been transcribed and cleaned up from its raw, pdf format, for easy manipulation.

Here are the original pdf reports:

Part 1: foil_animals1.pdf

Part 2: foil_animals2.pdf

*data was obtained through a request filed with the Parks Department under New York State's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL),