C. Sean Burns
This is a personal website in the spirit of a digital garden. It contains pages about niche things like plain text, reading, writing, coding, computer systems (and their history), research projects, teaching, education, cooking, family, and paying attention to the details with my limited senses.
The site is perfectly usable in a text-mode browser, such as w3m, Elinks, and more.
My About page contains some details.
Now
- Currently reading: Humour / .
- Learning: Playing around with substring expansion and other capabilities in and with
bash. - Researching: Working on a project about librarian publishing patterns.
- Academic reading: Diving back into domain analysis theory and reading a lot of Birger Hjørland's works.
The Text
The Text is probably the main page of this site. It's a single page that contains hundreds of short posts on a variety of topics. I started the page on April 23, 2019 and have been adding to it since.
Why is it a single page? It's a single page because a single, long page on random topics confuses search engines. I think that's funny because it shows that search engines have an inherent definition of what a document is, and a single, long page messes with that definition.
To add new posts to the page, I write a single markdown file, and then process that file with a
bash script,
which converts it to HTML, adds a bunch of extra tags, inserts into The Text page, creates a RSS entry, etc, etc.
The script uses a lot of sed and
ed commands,
which I also think is funny because these, especially ed, are not generally used for such things.
Research
My research topics broadly cover areas in scholarly communication, open science, open access, information retrieval, and academic libraries.
See my research summary page or my CV.
Teaching
I teach in Library Science (LS) and in Information, Communication, Technology (ICT) programs.
See my teaching summary page.
Books
I've written and made available open educational / open access textbooks for the courses that I teach. These textbooks cover systems librarianship, electronic resource management, Linux systems administration, personal knowledge management, and semantic web development.
Visit textbooks for the complete list.
Software
I teach a couple of courses that involve using the Bash shell on Linux. To facilitate that, I wrote several open source software applications to help students learn how to use Linux command line utitilies and to navigate the Linux filesystem.
Visit software applications to download and use them.
These applications were all written in bash, but they employ a lot of additional utilities.
I'm learning more bash to make them more bashy.
Bookshelf
Reading books is important. Here's my virtual bookshelf.
Notes
I've been keeping some Notes.