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.
Kang, J. Y., A. Michels, F. Lyu, Shaohua Wang, N. Agbodo, V. L. Freeman, and Shaowen Wang. 2020. Rapidly measuring spatial accessibility of COVID-19 healthcare resources: a case study of Illinois, USA. International Journal of Health Geographics 19 (1):1–17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12942-020-00229-x.