Barbara Buttenfield

Babs Buttenfield received the National Research Award by the UCGIS

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:51:30 +0000

Babs Buttenfield received the National Research Award by the UCGIS Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/21/2024 - 07:51

Babs Buttenfield received the national research award by the UCGIS (University Consortium for Geographic Information Science), for significant contributions to geospatial data generalization and modeling, multi-scale mapping and geodatabase design, most notably through her continuing Research Faculty affiliation with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Center for Excellence in Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS). This award has been given annually by UCGIS since 2002. https://www.ucgis.org/site/research-award

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Babs Buttenfield Presented With USGS 2023 CaGIS Distinguished Career Award

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:19:57 +0000

Babs Buttenfield Presented With USGS 2023 CaGIS Distinguished Career Award Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/24/2023 - 10:19

Reprinted from CaGIS Website

Dr. Barbara Buttenfield is a Professor Emerita of Geography at the University of Colorado where she is also the Director of the Meridian Research Lab which develops GIS applications and explores algorithm design and testing to advance knowledge about GIScience. She has had an illustrious and influential career in cartography and GIScience and continues contributing to the field while enjoying emerita status. She has had a long-standing focus on data generalizing and modeling, and she has made significant contributions to multi-scale mapping and database design, perhaps most notably through her continuing Research Faculty affiliation with the USGS Center for Excellence in Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS). Dr. Buttenfield’s diverse interests also include terrain modeling, dasymetric modeling, representations of uncertainly, error/accuracy assessment of spatial data, and graphical interface design and usability and evaluation, among other topics of relevance in cartography and GIScience. She has hundreds of publications in a variety of outlets; given and been invited to give presentations nationwide and internationally; won numerous awards for both her research and teaching; been an investigator on research grants earning millions of dollars; served as the lead and member on numerous national and institutional committees; and mentored scores of students, many of whom went on to hold prominent positions in academic, government, and the private sector.

In addition to her many academic and professional accomplishments, Dr. Buttenfield has been a leader in CaGIS and other professional societies. Her contributions to CaGIS (and previously the ACA) span more than two decades and include serving as a board member from 1990-1992 and again from 1994-1997 while she was president of the society from 1995-1996. The Society and its journal were shifting from cartography to geographic information systems to GIScience. In 1992, she surveyed ACA members to determine their interest in GIS, and she published the results in the society journal.4 In 1997, she was elected as an ACSM Fellow. She served on a Strategic Planning Committee from 2004-2005 to develop a plan for the Society to be more inclusive of geographic information systems and science. She served as the associate editor of the Cartography and Geographic Information Systems journal from 1993-1996. She has been on the editorial board of the CaGIS journal since 1991. In addition, she has served on the Program Committees for AutoCarto every year since 2010.

Dr. Buttenfield has also been integrally involved in the ICA, UCGIS, NACIS, and AAG. For the ICA, she has served on the Scientific Program Committee for the International Cartographic Conferences and workshops of the ICA Commission on Generalization and Multiple Representations since 2011. For her service to the organization, she was elected as a Fellow of UCGIS and was awarded its inaugural National GIScience Educator of the Year Award in 2001. In 2020, she was honored with the AAG’s Distinguished Teaching Honors.

And last but certainly not least, Dr. Buttenfield is also an advocate for women in science, as is evidenced by these activities and achievements: From 2017 to 2021, she was a Project Director of the Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM (TRELIS-GS) project mainly funded through the NSF to address the low level of participation by women in geographic information science and technology; In 2010, she was elected to membership in the Society of Women Geographers; In 2013, she was one of nine women cartographers whose career is highlighted in Map Worlds: History of Women in Cartography by WC van den Hoonard, Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

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Babs Buttenfield Presents Keynote Address at CEGIS Conference

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 19:12:30 +0000

Babs Buttenfield Presents Keynote Address at CEGIS Conference Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/02/2022 - 13:12

Babs Buttenfield presented the opening keynote address this morning at the USGS Center for Excellence in Geospatial Science (CEGIS) Annual Research Conference in Rolla Missouri. The title of her talk was "The Trouble with Geospatial Science: Unsolved Problems, Unresolved Obstacles".

The CEGIS vision is to conduct, lead, and influence the research and innovative solutions required by the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and the emerging GeoSpatial and GeoSemantic Web. CEGIS is a virtual organization with Federal and academic affiliate scientists conducting research in support of The National Map and the Three-Dimensional Elevation Program (3DEP).

The U.S. Geological Survey Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS) was created in 2006 and since that time has provided research primarily in support of The National Map. The presentations and publications of the CEGIS researchers document the research accomplishments that include advances in electronic topographic map design, generalization, data integration, map projections, sea level rise modeling, geospatial semantics, ontology, user-centered design, volunteer geographic information, and parallel and grid computing for geospatial data from The National Map. A research plan spanning 2013–18 has been developed extending the accomplishments of the CEGIS researchers and documenting new research areas that are anticipated to support The National Map of the future. In addition to extending the 2006–12 research areas, the CEGIS research plan for 2013–18 includes new research areas in data models, geospatial semantics, high-performance computing, volunteered geographic information, crowdsourcing, social media, data integration, and multiscale representations to support the Three-Dimensional Elevation Program (3DEP) and The National Map of the future of the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Babs Buttenfield Awarded AAG Distinguished Teaching Honors

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 19:31:30 +0000

Babs Buttenfield Awarded AAG Distinguished Teaching Honors Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/15/2020 - 12:31

PRESS RELEASE
Embargoed for Tuesday, December 15, 2020

WASHINGTON, D.C….The American Association of Geographers (AAG) announced the recipients of its 2021 AAG Honors, the highest honors bestowed on its members.

Distinguished Teaching Honors

Barbara “Babs” Buttenfield, University of Colorado-Boulder, for her career-long devotion to GIScience education. Buttenfield, who established one of the first campus curricula in GIScience, is renowned for her engaging teaching style, remarkable ability to explain complex concepts through example and metaphor, and skill at blending theory with technical skills. In a rapidly evolving field, she delivers courses that are at the cutting edge of GIScience.

Since 1951, AAG Honors have been offered annually to recognize outstanding accomplishments by members in research and scholarship, teaching, education, service to the discipline, public service outside academe, and for lifetime achievement. The AAG Honors Committee is elected by the AAG membership and charged with making award recommendations for each category, with no more than two awards given in any one category. This year’s Honors Committee members are Julie A. Silva, University of Maryland College Park (Chair); Amy Glasmeier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ronald Hagleman, III, Texas State University; Richard Kujawa, St. Michael's College; Andrew Sluyter, Louisiana State University; and Julie Winkler, Michigan State University.

For more than 100 years, The American Association of Geographers (AAG) has contributed to the advancement of geography. Our members from nearly 100 countries share interests in the theory, methods, and practice of geography, which they cultivate through the AAG's Annual Meeting, scholarly journals (Annals of the American Association of Geographers, The Professional Geographer , the AAG Review of Books and GeoHumanities), and the online AAG Newsletter. The AAG is a 501(c)3 nonprofitorganization founded in 1904.

To find out more about the 2021 AAG Honors recipients, visit this link. FOR INTERVIEWS OR INFORMATION, CONTACT Lisa Schamess, phone 202.234.1450, ext 1164 or lschamess@aag.org

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What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:16:34 +0000

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/10/2020 - 17:16

Barbara (Babs) Buttenfield

I’ve been asked to reflect on my efforts to build a GIS curriculum here at ��Ƶ-Boulder. When I arrived on campus in January 1996, there wasn’t an actual curriculum in place, just a single GIS class offered intermittently by part-time lecturers. One was Loey Knapp, a full-time employee at the IBM facility in town, and another was Ed Delaney, who left Colorado to work as a GIS analyst on Type 1 Incident Fire Teams up and down the Rocky Mountain corridor. Classes at the time were taught on a small number of Unix workstations running ARC/INFO, an early version of the suite of software that now includes ArcGIS Desktop and ArcPro. The department controlled a few Apple Macintosh machines that could run ArcView. All machines were housed in the basement of Guggenheim in the room that became KESDA (the Ken Erickson Spatial Data Analysis lab), named in 1996 for the ��Ƶ Geography professor who published research on conservation and who taught cartography for 28 years.

The department was and continues to be supportive of my intention to create a world-class GIS program. I began to develop and teach GIS, Cartography and Information Design, Cartographic Animation, and GIS modeling. The campus computing center (then called Information and Technology Services, or ITS) was opposed to supporting any software that could not find wide use in every computer lab on campus, in spite of our classes enrolling students from all across campus. ITS informed me in 1997 they would cancel the ARC/INFO site license because it was “too costly”, even though they were charging $395 per seat and using those funds to pay for the campus site license. At that time, a working knowledge of ESRI software was a basic qualification for any student entering the GIS job market, so without the license, our fledgling curriculum would cease to provide marketable skills to students. I contacted the GIS professors Lynn Johnston (��Ƶ Denver Civil Engineering) and John Harner (��Ƶ Colorado Springs Geography), and the three of us negotiated with ESRI for a joint ��Ƶ system-wide site license at a reduced cost for all three campuses. In following years, the use of ESRI software increased so fast across campus that the cost per seat dropped steadily and today is free to all campus users, including students, faculty, College technology services such as ASSETT, campus planning offices and FACMAN, who have hired several graduates directly from our program.

Ken Erickson Spatial Data Analysis lab (KESDA) in 2004. Named in 1996 for the ��Ƶ Geography professor who published research on conservation and who taught cartography for 28 years. Photo by Jim Robb.

KESDA in 2020. Photo by Jeff Nicholson.

Over time, the department has added three tenure-track faculty lines and a full-time instructor to the curriculum. Course emphasis has shifted from teaching just the basic use of commercial software to emphasizing Python programming and production of open-source software tools on Jupyter and similar platforms. The curriculum now spans a dozen regularly offered courses in GIS Quantitative Methods and Spatial Analysis, with more currently under development. We regularly place students completing degrees at software companies such as MAXAR (formerly DigitalGlobe), ESRI, SUN Microsystems; at federal, state and local agencies; and in research and faculty positions at other universities. The department has a vital internship program and roughly 2/3 of the positions offered in any year request GIS and geospatial analytic skills. We receive applications from all over the world from highly qualified students wishing to pursue graduate work. GIS and geospatial data science methods are utilized by many faculty and students studying geographic applications in climate change, fire science, population growth, hydrology, biogeography, habitat degradation, war and conflict, and public health. Our GIS faculty are working to develop new tools and advanced methods to support uncertainty assessment, to build multi-scale databases, and to integrate data over space and time.

Looking back, it’s taken a quarter of a century to establish a vital curriculum. That may seem a long time, but not to anyone who has built a university-level curriculum from an essentially blank slate. Importantly, I could not have accomplished this alone. Along the way, a few valued GIS colleagues left the program, and equally valued new colleagues joined. Without the help of all of these people, the curriculum would not be, indeed could not be what it is today. As I retire at the end of this year, I am leaving much unfinished, and that’s the best way to foster future growth and advance. I hope that I have catalyzed a critical momentum that will carry our GIS program forward in productive and likely unforeseen ways in coming years.

Also see the news item in this newsletter about Babs receiving the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Distinguished Teaching honors for her career-long devotion to GIScience education. -- Editor

Department logo with a nod to the GIS curriculum Babs developed.

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Babs Buttenfield: Technology changing how people use maps, how they're created

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:11:18 +0000

Babs Buttenfield: Technology changing how people use maps, how they're created Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/13/2020 - 17:11

Babs Buttenfield was interviewed for a Channel 7 (Denver 7) TV News spot about how technology has changed how people use maps.

Posted: 4:45 PM, Jan 03, 2020, Updated: 4:58 PM, Jan 03, 2020, By: Chloe Nordquist, Channel 7 News, Denver

[video:https://vimeo.com/384646457]

Maps have changed over the years and so has how we use them. What used to be a final product is now an ever-changing data set, which has put map-making in the hands of everyone.

“The world is divided into two types of people, those who love maps, and those who can’t understand why people love maps,” Christopher Lane, owner of The Philadelphia Print Shop West, said. He has been selling antique maps for almost four decades.

“When you get an antique map and you actually look at it, it opens up the world in a way that today’s maps don’t,” Lane said. “They show the state of knowledge, or belief at least at the time.”

He’s watched as we went from pulling out folded maps to find our way, to pulling out phones. Phones now give us constantly updated direction in the palm of our hand.

“The maps today that most people interact with are very much linear,” Lane explained. “You’re going somewhere and your map shows you your route as you go.”

This shift has impacted two particular industries -- cartography, the science of drawing maps, and GIS, or geographic information systems.

“We thought of maps as documents, as a finished product,” Dr. Barbara Buttenfield, a Research Cartographer at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a former president of the American cartographic Association, said. “Now what we think of is a map as an information refinery.”

One study done by Prescient & Strategic Intelligence Market Research shows the value of the global GIS market. They predict the industry is worth about $10.8 billion in 2018, but that number is expected to rise to $19.7 billion by 2024.

“Anybody can make a map, anybody can use it, and anybody can add information to it or publish it on the internet,” Dr. Buttenfield said.

“Today we do everything digitally,” Tom Neer with Digital Data Services, Inc. said. “The industry hasn’t actually changed that much. It’s the tools that we use for that.”

Neer explained that the industry has moved away from specialized programs, and toward web applications that anybody can use. These tools have allowed mapping to become more interactive.

“Google is tracking you as you drive to and from work, and can actually tell you based on all the other data their collecting, where traffic is bound up,” Neer explained. “That was impossible 20 years ago, to crowd source all that information.”

While more data is being poured into digital maps, some have raised concerns that more data is coming out.

“I’ve just told something to a lot of companies that are paying attention to where I go and what I do,” Dr. Buttenfield said. “I think a lot of people are concerned about that.”

“Anytime you’re using new technology, if you don’t know what the product is, you need to assume that you are the product,” Neer said.

As of 2015, 90 percent of adult smartphone users use their phones to get directions or other information relating to their location, according to Pew Research.

“The technology is going to continue to advance,” Dr. Buttenfield said. “I would encourage people to not be fearful of it, to embrace it.”

As technology advances, Lane believes people can still find value in traditional maps. “I think these bigger maps just open up the world in a way that people are losing today,” he said.

“As a traditional cartographer, if there was one downside, it’s the art seems to get lost,” Neer said.

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Babs Participates in Alzheimer's Fundraiser

Anonymous — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 06:00:00 +0000

Babs Participates in Alzheimer's Fundraiser Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 08/11/2018 - 00:00

On August 11, Professor Barbara "babs" Buttenfield participated in a fund-raising walk to raise money for the Walk to End Alzheimer's, honoring our geography colleague Professor David Hill, who passed away recently from the disease. Held annually in more than 600 communities nationwide, the Alzheimer's Association Walk to End Alzheimer’s® is the world’s largest event to raise awareness and funds for Alzheimer’s care, support and research. Babs raised $1,000 for this year's event from Geography colleagues and friends.

Memory Walk® began in 1989 with nine Alzheimer’s Association chapters raising $149,000 from 1,249 participants. In 1993, Memory Walk grew into an event nationwide and raised $4.5 million at 167 locations. In 2015 more than 50,000 teams participated in more than 600 Walks across the country, raising more than $75 million. The Alzheimer’s Association has mobilized millions of Americans in the fight against the disease and continues to lead the way with the Walk to End Alzheimer’s®.

Congratulations to Babs on raising $1000 for this important cause!

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Babs Elected Parliamentarian of the Arts and Sciences Council

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 21:44:40 +0000

Babs Elected Parliamentarian of the Arts and Sciences Council Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/26/2018 - 15:44

Barbara "babs" Buttenfield has been elected as the inaugural Parliamentarian of the Arts and Sciences Council (ASC), which is the faculty senate for the College of Arts & Sciences. This is a new officer position, added to the ASC ByLaws this spring to accommodate and support the increased complexities of ASC leadership. The Parliamentarian advises the current ASC Chair and Executive Committee on matters of policy and procedure, insuring that ASC activities and decisions align with ASC ByLaws, BFA Bylaws, and the Rules of the Regents, especially on matters of shared faculty governance. Qualifications for the Parliamentarian are being a senior faculty member who has served previously as ASC Chair and who is not currently serving as a department chair, center or institute director. The term runs for one year with possibility of renewal.

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Geography Department featured in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 15:40:09 +0000

Geography Department featured in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/27/2017 - 09:40

"Encompassing South American wildfires, Arctic sea-ice retreat, post-Soviet politics, climate change in Tibet and GIS, ��Ƶ Boulder geographers keep their fingers on the pulse of a changing world"

A new article titled "This is not your junior-high geography" by ��Ƶ's Clint Talbott featuring the Geography Department has been published in the Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine. The article presents an overview of the breadth of research undertaken by several faculty members and aims to redefine "Geography" by discussing the nature of our work. Check it out today!

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Prof reappointed to U.S. Census Science Advisory Committee (CSAC)

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 20:21:54 +0000

Prof reappointed to U.S. Census Science Advisory Committee (CSAC) Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/01/2016 - 13:21

Barbara 'babs' Buttenfield was reappointed to CSAC by the Director of the Census Bureau for a second three year term. CSAC members advise the Census Bureau director on the uses of scientific developments in statistical data collection, survey methodology, geospatial and statistical analysis, econometrics, business operations and computer science as they pertain to the full range of Census Bureau programs and activities, including census tests, policies, data collection and analysis.

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