Report 4: Replication Study of Kang et al. (2020)
This reanalysis concerns a paper by Kang et al. (2020) which pertains to access to hospitals in Chicago, US in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The GEOG0323 class was charged with making changes to how the workflow calculated speed and travel time for edges in a road network for the city as well as the original implementation of the enhanced two-step floating catchment area method.
This reanalysis was one of the first times I have changed Python code myself, and as such I feel I learned about how this programming language works differently to R. Students also used CyberGISX to access a remote computer which could run the analysis more quickly. This was a novel experience for me, and I learned that one can push to GitHub from such a remote platform. In class, I learned much from Professor Holler about the details of road networks, area-weighted reaggregation, and analyses using catchment areas. The concept of creating spatial analyses using travel time was not one I had seen in other GIS classes, where I had focused on other network-based concepts such as least cost pathways for wildlife corridors. I am grateful to have been able to change this original reproduction study in this renanalysis, and I feel it made a positive difference to the ability of a reader to interpret the accessibility map output.
Here is a link to the full repository for the reproduction study.