University of Minnesota Highlights GeoDI Lab’s Visitor Census Study

Our recent study, A Visitor-Enriched Census in US Cities Using Large-Scale Mobile Positioning Data, was recently featured by the University of Minnesota in a campus-wide news article.

🔗 Read the full story: https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/new-map-brings-census-data-life

Published in Scientific Data, this research introduces the concept of a “Visitor Census” — a dataset that goes beyond where people live to capture where they go, and what socioeconomic characteristics they bring into different neighborhoods.

In the interview, Di Zhu, Assistant Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and corresponding author of the study, notes:

“Traditional census data tells us where people live, but not where they go. That’s like knowing everyone’s mailing address but nothing about their daily lives. By capturing who visits where — and what social and economic backgrounds they bring — we’re giving neighborhoods a fuller, more dynamic identity that reflects how cities actually function.”

This project invites us to see cities not just as static collections of residents, but as spaces constantly shaped by daily mobility, spatial interaction, and cross-community visitation. By enriching census knowledge with human movement data, the Visitor Census provides a fresh lens to understand urban inequality, neighborhood dynamics, and the lived fabric of cities.

🔍 Learn more about the research and access the dataset:
📄 Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05410-0
📂 Data & code: https://github.com/GeoDI-Lab/Visitor_census