# The Geospatial Neighborhood Analysis Package

geosnap makes it easier to explore, model, analyze, and visualize the social and spatial dynamics of neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are important for a wide variety of reasons, but they’re hard to study because of some long-standing challenges, including that

• there is no formal definition of a “neighborhood” so identifying and modeling them is frought with uncertainty
• many different physical and social data can characterize a neighborhood (e.g. its proximity to the urban core, its share of residents with a high school education, or the median price of its apartments) so there are countless ways to model neighborhoods by choosing different subsets of attributes
• conceptually, neighborhoods evolve through both space and time, meaning their socially-construed boundaries can shift over time, as can their demographic makeup.
• geographic tabulation units change boundaries over time, meaning the raw data are aggregated to different areal units at differerent points in time.

To address these challenges,geosnap provides a suite of tools for creating socio-spatial datasets, harmonizing those datasets into consistent set of time-static boundaries, modeling bespoke neighborhoods and prototypical neighborhood types, and modeling neighborhood change using classic and spatial statistical methods. It also provides a set of static and interactive visualization tools to help you display and understand the critical information at each step of the process.

Batteries Included: geosnap comes packed with 30 years of census data, thanks to quilt, so you can get started modeling neighborhoods in the U.S. immediately. But you’re not just limited to the data provided with the package. geosnap works with any data you provide, any place in the world.

## Installation

The recommended method for installing geosnap is with anaconda. To get started with the development version, clone this repository or download it manually then cd into the directory and run the following commands:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate geosnap
python setup.py develop


This will download the appropriate dependencies and install geosnap in its own conda environment.

## Development

geosnap development is hosted on github

## Bug reports

To search for or report bugs, please see geosnap’s issues

See the file “LICENSE.txt” for information on the history of this software, terms & conditions for usage, and a DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES.

## Citation

For a generic citation of geosnap, we recommend the following:

@misc{Knaap2019,
author = {Knaap, Elijah and Kang, Wei and Rey, Sergio and Wolf, Levi John and Cortes, Renan Xavier and Han, Su},
doi = {10.5281/ZENODO.3526163},
title = {geosnap: The Geospatial Neighborhood Analysis Package},
url = {https://zenodo.org/record/3526163},
year = {2019}
}


If you need to cite a specific release of the package, please find the appropriate version on Zenodo

## Funding

This project is supported by NSF Award #1733705, Neighborhoods in Space-Time Contexts