Acknowledgments

This work would not have existed without the tremendous efforts by the people behind the development of the GeoDa software over the past twenty some years. This started in the early 2000s in the Spatial Analysis Laboratory at the University of Illinois, with major contributions by Ibnu Syabri, supported by the NSF-funded Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS). Later, the software development was continued at the GeoDa Center of Arizona State University with Marc McCann as the main software engineer. The last ten years, Xun Li has served as the lead developer of the software. In addition, he has also been a close collaborator on several methodological refinements of the LISA approach. Julia Koschinsky has been on the team for some twenty years, as a constant inspiration and collaborator, starting at UIUC and most recently at the Center for Spatial Data Science of the University of Chicago. Xun and Julia have been instrumental in the migration of GeoDa from a closed source Windows-based desktop software to an open source and cross-platform ecosystem for exploring spatial data. Julia in particular has been at the forefront of refining the role of ESDA within a scientific reasoning framework, which I have tried to represent in the book.

Over the years, the research behind the methods covered in this book and the accompanying software development has been funded by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control, as well as by institutional support by the University of Chicago to the Center for Spatial Data Science.

Finally, Emily has been patiently living with my GeoDa obsession for many years. This book is dedicated to her.

Shelby, MI, Summer 2023