Where COVID-19 Analysis

: In this lesson, we will study the research paper and implementation of a COVID-19 accessibility analysis.

Wednesday, May 12

Lecture

Prior to lecture, please read:

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. DOI:10.1186/s12942-020-00229-x.

To the best of your ability, draw or outline a workflow for this analysis. You may work in partners or small groups on this task.

The paper describes the analysis and cyberinfrastructure behind the spatial access component of this Where COVID-19 dashboard for Illinois
Derrick Burt and Kufre Udoh completed a reproduction and replication of the study
Since that time, the authors have continued to update the code in the Jupyter notebook for the study on CyberGISX
CyberGISX is a geospatial cyberinfrastructure project at the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Dr. Shaowen Wang. It is set up to run Juypter notebooks using Python with a suite of pre-installed packages for data science and spatial analysis.
CyberGISX is a prime example of geospatial cyberinfrastructure

go to CyberGISX Login
Create an account
Full name: you know who you are
Organizational Email: use your @middlebury.edu address
Organization: Middlebury College
Github Username: your GitHub user name
Personal Webiste Link: your .github.io GitHub pages address
Role: student
What class: geog 0323 spring 2021 open source GIScience

Lab

The goal of this lab is to get accustomed to working in a cyberinfrastructure environment with Python, Jupyter notebooks, and GitHub integration. We will do so with the Jupyter notebook published to accompany Kang et al (2020). The notebook has been published on CyberGISX and maintained in a GitHub repository

By the end of lab, you should have:

executed the complete notebook
taken notes and added comments to the code cells and/or content to the markdown cells in the notebook on CyberGISX to understand how the code relates to the publication (i.e. which blocks of code implement which sections of the paper?)
pushed your changed (annotated) version of the notebook back to your own GitHub repository

Advice:

Use the Hour of CI Gateway Lesson to learn how Jupyter notebooks work and how to use them.
Use the RP-Kang version of the repository. It contains some bug fixes in a pending pull request to the authors from yours truly.
Use the instructions below to learn how to import a project into CyberGISX and push your changes to GitHub.
Feel free to team up, but make sure you also run the code in your own account simultaneously.
You may have to make the notebook trusted to see all outputs. This button is in the top-right corner of the notebook.
Much as in R, you can skip around a Jupyter notebook trying to execute different code blocks. However, code blocks often depend on prior code blocks to load packages, define functions, or define or modify data variables.
The plain text narrative is achieved with Markdown blocks, similar to markdown in GitHub or R.
Given the choice of Processors, Region, Population, and Resource, keep the default values. Other options may not function at this time.
How will this analysis conclude? Sneak a peek here

Transitioning to next week you should:

Compare the code repository to the published paper and brainstorm ways in which the code repository could be improved with regards to computational efficiency/speed, reproducibility, uncertainty, errors, cartography, aesthetics, readability…

Integrating GitHub with CyberGISX

Below I will outline three workflows. Geog 323 students, please just follow the first two. The third is for reference.

Cloning a GitHub repository into CyberGISX
Making changes on CyberGISX and pushing them to GitHub
Pushing a CyberGISX project to a new GitHub repository

Cloning a GitHub repository into CyberGISX

Fork a python notebook repository into your own GitHub account
geog 323 students, please fork the RP-Kang repository for the Kang et al (2020) paper. This is a forked version of the original repository but fixes some bugs.
If the repository name conflicts with any folders in your CyberGISX server then, rename it.
Go to your CyberGISX home page
In the top-right corner, go to new and terminal to open the Linux command-line terminal.
Now, we will clone the GitHub repository using the Linux terminal (Linux is an open-source operating system) and command line Git. Follow the following commands:
ls : list files and folders
cd work : change the directory to work
ls : check to see if there are any folders with an identical name to your repository. If so, rename either the repository or the folder.
git clone https://github.com/gituser/RP-Kang : where gituser is the user or organization name and RP-Kang is the repository name. In other words, you need the URL of the repository you want to clone.
ls : check to see if the repository has been added.
If the new directory is all set, you can switch back to your CyberGISX home page, and leave the terminal open in another browser tab for convenience.
Open the RP-Kang folder, browse the data folder to see what’s there (and where)
Open the COVID-19Aacc.ipybn Jupyter notebook.

Making changes on CyberGISX and pushing them to GitHub

Make a discrete set of changes to your project in the form of (re)organizing folders or files, creating new files, or editing .ipybn notebooks and saving them.
It’s best to clear the outputs of your notebook and save it before committing changes. In the notebook menu, go to Cell –> All Output –> Clear
Open the terminal
cd : to change the directory to the root folder of your project, e.g. you should be inside RP-Kang inside work to run any git commands on your RP-Kang repository
if you need to move up a directory, use cd ..
git config --global user.email "josephh@middlebury.edu" : configure your GitHub user name
git config --global user.name "josephholler" : configure your GitHub email
git remote get-url origin : Check the existing remote connection. The connection should point to your own GitHub repository. If it doesn’t use the next line to change it!
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/gituser/RP-Kang : Change the remote connection to your own repository, replacing gituser with your own GitHub user name.
git remote -v : verify that the change worked
git add . : to add changes from all files or git add jupyter.ipynb to add a specific file’s changes to the commit, with the example of a Jupyter notebook eponymously named jupyter
git commit -m "commit description" : to commit the staged changes, hopefully with a better description than my example
git push origin : to push the commit to GitHub
You may get a warning from GitHub that command-line authentication will be deprecated. Until then, forge ahead!

Pushing a CyberGISX project to a GitHub repository

You can create a project in CyberGISX by copying an existing notebook. E.g. the COVID-19 notebooks are indexed here and the Kang et al (2020) notebook is here
Each notebook features an Open with CyberGISX button, which will copy the notebook into your logged-in CyberGISX account. Beware: if you have already copied the notebook once, you will get inconsistent results with this copy feature. If you must keep two versions of the same notebook, then rename the folder containing the first before making a second copy.
Go to your CyberGISX home page
You should see a folder with the notebook name you just copied, e.g. COVID-19AccessibilityNotebook containing the .ipynb Jupyter notebook and any required data.

Now that the notebook has been copied into your CyberGISX account, you need a GitHub repository for this project.

Go to GitHub.com and start creating a new repository with an easy-to-type and relevant name, e.g. RP-Kang
Copy the new repository’s URL. e.g. mine was https://github.com/josephholler/RP-Kang.git

Now the harder part: connecting the CyberGISX notebook to your GitHub repository using the Linux terminal and command line Git. Linux is an open-source operating system and its file and folder names are case-sensitive.

In the top-right corner, go to new and terminal to open the Linux command-line terminal.
Follow the following commands:
ls list files and folders
cd work change the directory to work
ls
cd COVID-19AccessibilityNotebook change the directory to the COVID-19 Notebook
git init initialize git repository. One exists already, because all of the Git files were copied from the original repository
git add . : add all the files to the repository
git config --global user.email "josephh@middlebury.edu" : configure your GitHub user name
git config --global user.name "josephholler" : configure your GitHub email
git remote get-url origin : Check the existing remote connection. The connection should point to your own GitHub repository. If it doesn’t use the next line to change it!
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/gituser/RP-Kang : Change the remote connection to your own repository, replacing gituser with your own GitHub user name.
git remote -v : verify that the change worked
git commit -m "first commit" : commit the changes, where the description of changes is in quotes. -m is for main branch.
git push origin : push your changes to GitHub! The command line will ask for your username and password.
You may get a warning from GitHub that command-line authentication will be deprecated. Until then, forge ahead!

Helpful References

Git Commands: Importing projects to GitHub with command line
Git Basics: Git Basics
Python package for vector features & analysis: geopandas
Python package for OpenStreetMap and specifically for network data in OSM: osmnx documents, repository and examples repository, and repository for version 0.11.4
Python package for network analysis: networkx

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