C. Sean Burns

Associate Professor

University of Kentucky
College of Communication and Information
School of Information Science
PhD, University of Missouri, 2013
MA, University of Missouri, 2009
BA, Monmouth College, 1996

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cseanburns
GitHub: https://github.com/cseanburns
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8695-3643

News

Upcoming Talks

I'm excited to be giving an invited talk at the upcoming AGU (American Geophysical Union) conference on December 16, 2021. The talk is titled Fostering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Science, which is part of a half-day session on open science that is titled Yes, We're Open! The Benefits of FAIR Data and Open Science.

Research

Recent Publications

MEDLINE search retrieval issues: A longitudinal query analysis of five vendor platforms in PLOS ONE, with Tyler Nix, Robert Shapiro, and Jeffrey Huber. 2021.

What documents cannot do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi and the tacit knowledge dilemma in Information & Culture. 2021. If needed, use the Open Access (Post Print version).

Retrieving arguments and support after publication: Archiving links in communication research published in Communication Studies, with Patric Spence. 2020.

Manuscripts Under Review

Mixed Findings in Directly Replicated Experimental Studies on Fake News, with Renee Kaufmann and Anthony Limperos. My GitHub repository, news study project, includes the R code, and some of the data, for this project.

Current Manuscripts

I am writing a paper on tacit knowing, knowledge management, and open science.

Teaching

I regularly teach the following four courses:

Undergraduate

ICT 418: Linux Systems Administration
Undergraduate course covering systems administration using the Fedora GNU/Linux operating system. Topics include Bash scripting, managing users, installing, securing, and managing services such as MySQL, and more. Lectures and demo scripts for this course are on GitHub: Linux Systems Administration.
ICT 420: Semantic Web Development
Undergraduate course focused on HTML5, CSS3, JSON-LD, and Git as well as usability and accessibility. Main software tools: text editor, SFTP, GitHub. Demo and other material for this course are on GitHub Semantic Web Development.

Graduate

LIS 617: Electronic Resource Management
Graduate course on managing electronic resources for libraries. Topics covered include the technologies and systems involved, legal issues such as managing copyright, contract negotiation, and more. Lectures and other material for this course are on GitHub: Electronic Resource Management.
LIS/ICT 658: Knowledge Management
Graduate course on organizational knowledge management with some emphasis on disaster and risk management and communication. Although this is an online course, students are central in selecting specific readings.

I regularly taught the following undergraduate course, but now teach it mainly when I take on summer teaching.

ICT 201: Personal Knowledge Management
Undergraduate course on managing personal information and knowledge work flows. I would share my lectures and resources for this course, but I'm working on a major revision and will wait until that revision is complete. Lectures and other materials for this course are on GitHub: Personal Knowledge Management.

Systems Administration

I maintain two Linux servers for colleagues and students at my School to support class activities. I use one dedicated server to host WordPress and Omeka installations that support the library science and the information and communication technologies (ICT) programs. I use a separate virtual machine on a hosting service to provide shell and MySQL accounts to support several courses in our undergraduate ICT program.

Statistics Notes

There are better and more complete tutorials on the web, and the R documentation is great, but I do keep some basic notes on using R for statistics on my wiki. Some of these notes are based on introductory presentations I've given on R, but some were written as refreshers if I needed them. Or, one way I learned how to use R is by replicating, in R, lessons from statistics textbooks that used other software packages. Some of the notes below are based on that process.

The Text, Please. Just the Text.

  1. On Smiling
  2. Breakthrough Case Update, Day 10
  3. Breakthrough Case Update, Day 6
  4. Breakthrough Case Update, Day 5
  5. Breakthrough Case Update, Day 4
  6. Breakthrough Case Update
  7. The Inevitable Happened
  8. Groff and Troff
  9. On Forgetting
  10. On Ungrading and Learning
  11. Some Automation
  12. OpenURL
  13. Cold Showers
  14. Vim, Ed, and also Markdown
  15. Rest
  16. Breathing
  17. When I Feel Best
  18. Measuring Food with Pandas
  19. Mushroom Hunting
  20. diff, ed, patch
  21. Vegetarian Red Bean Soup
  22. Comical Kids
  23. Knots
  24. I Got Rice
  25. Solo Camping in a Thunderstorm
  26. Ten Miles
  27. When Did I Learn
  28. First Day Energies
  29. Quotes from Didion
  30. Wim Hof Guided Breathing
  31. Timing is Everything
  32. A Timer
  33. Back to Ubuntu
  34. Site Update
  35. 458 Days
  36. A Meaningless Post on Measuring Food
  37. Why Libraries Are Fascinating to Me
  38. Ferment Fail
  39. The Aliens Are Here
  40. Back to School
  41. An Open Science Example
  42. Phoning It In
  43. No Sudo For You
  44. The Liminal Space That Was
  45. The Aha Moment
  46. Mix It Up
  47. Wrong Hard Drive
  48. Larry McMurtry
  49. Professor Suda
  50. Another Anniversary
  51. One Year
  52. On Cooking Shows
  53. Cook's Log, Fermentation Date 28
  54. On Alphabetizing
  55. The Restorative Work of Reading Just Books
  56. Cook's Log, Fermentation Date 11
  57. Font Lode
  58. Be Virtuous
  59. Cook's Log, Fermentation Date 9
  60. Puzzled
  61. Salt the Hash
  62. Not Really a Kobayashi Maru
  63. I Miss John and Neighbors
  64. On Top
  65. Fermented Cabbage
  66. My Sysadmin Work
  67. Back To i3
  68. On File Systems
  69. Loud, Clamorous, Blaring
  70. In My Next Life
  71. You Have Mail, too
  72. You Have Mail
  73. A Good Long Walk
  74. Always the Tinkerer
  75. Fedora Switch Complete
  76. My Desktop after Eight Years
  77. I Will Pass on Time Travel
  78. Citizen Science
  79. On Aging
  80. The Trick to Social Media
  81. On Conservatives
  82. Lullabies and Mixtapes
  83. More Hard
  84. Somewhat Automated
  85. The Dark, Hard Days
  86. On Buddies
  87. Three Quarters of a Year
  88. On Fezzik
  89. On Ebooks
  90. A Good Read
  91. Let's Dance
  92. On Sudoku
  93. On Carrots
  94. Primate Lessons
  95. On Solace
  96. Surreality Polarity Reversal
  97. Dear Mom
  98. Not That 1984
  99. On the Historical Person
  100. A Pictorial List
  101. On Covid19 and Keystone Species
  102. s/awk/R/
  103. s/sed/awk/
  104. On Marriage
  105. On Teaching Linux
  106. Dark Nights
  107. On Revising
  108. On Distractions
  109. A Distro Hop
  110. On Conspiracy Theories
  111. Earth's Holocaust
  112. Come Sail Away
  113. On the Bookshelf
  114. The Chronicles
  115. Past Colleagues
  116. On Consistency
  117. Restaurant Dreams
  118. 35 Days
  119. An Action Under Which Description
  120. The Slow Down
  121. I'd Rather
  122. It's the Little Things
  123. On Research Speed
  124. On Stress Relief
  125. On Sheltering
  126. On Social Distancing
  127. Losing a Walker Friend
  128. When a Baby Cries as a Toddler
  129. Converting Markdown to HTML with Table of Contents Using Pandoc
  130. Switching Window Managers
  131. Remembering Some Text
  132. Some Observations on Usability Pertaining to a Child
  133. Bad Superblock
  134. A Quick Bash One-Liner and Children
  135. Tidyverse Skeptic Too
  136. Make Email Fun
  137. Some Routines I Find Calming
  138. The Product
  139. The Walkers
  140. On Solitude
  141. On Writing and its Tools
  142. Using Ed, The Standard Text Editor
  143. Keeping it Minimal