C. Sean Burns

News

January 22, 2021

I officially start my sabbatical this semester. I'm working on several research projects and also revising two courses.

September 12, 2020

I gave a talk for one of our monthly College research presentations on Functional Search Problems among MEDLINE Databases (see link to Zoom for the recorded video). Slides are on GitHub.

July 29, 2020

I gave a presentation on increasing participation in online discussion forums to members of my college. The notes and slides are on GitHub and the video is on my School's website, along with videos on flipped classroom instruction from some of my wonderful colleagues. These may be helpful to others teaching online for the first time.

Research

Recent Publications

• Editorial on Retrieving arguments and support after publication: Archiving links in communication research published in Communication Studies with Patric Spence. 2020.
• Research paper on Search result outliers among MEDLINE platforms published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association with Robert Shapiro, Tyler Nix, and Jeffrey Huber. 2019.

Current Manuscripts

• Research paper in-press and due out March 2021, titled What documents cannot do; Revisiting Polanyi and the tacit knowledge dilemma in Information & Culture.
• Research paper under fourth round of review, titled Methodological issues with search in MEDLINE: A longitudinal query analysis (preprint link to bioRxiv) in PLOS ONE.
• Research paper in writing and analysis stage examining how the presentation of and metadata in news articles influences perceptions of fake news, with Renee Kaufmann and Anthony Limperos.

Recent Conference Papers

• Paper on Bibliographic subject analysis of fake news accepted to QQML 2020 Barcelona, Spain. With Jenny Bossaller. May 2020. Presented virtually due to COVID-19.

Work in Progress

• Research and Creative Activities grant awarded for a fake news project titled How news articles as documents influence perceptions of fake news in the amount of $2,336. With Renee Kaufmann and Anthony Limperos. February 2020. University of Kentucky, College of Communication and Information.

Teaching

Spring 2021

I will be on a sabbatical writing a book and preparing a grant submission.

Fall 2020

I'm teaching an extra course this semester to help with pandemic related issues. Normally it's a 2/2 course load.

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 demonstration transcripts are stored in my GitHub repo here:
https://github.com/cseanburns/linux_sysadmin

LIS 690: 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, and more. Lectures are stored in my GitHub repo here:
https://github.com/cseanburns/electronic_resource_mgmt

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.

Spring 2020

ICT 420: Semantic Web Development: Undergraduate course focused on HTML5, CSS3, JSON-LD, and Git as well as usability and accessibility. Main software tool: text editor, SFTP, GitHub. Notes and demos are stored in my GitHub repo here:
https://github.com/cseanburns/webdev

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.

Current Git Repos

Research Repos

• The medline project includes R code for a research project about MEDLINE databases.

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.

The Text, Please. Just the Text.

Links to Short Essays

1. You Have Mail, too
2. You Have Mail
3. A Good Long Walk
4. Always the Tinkerer
5. Fedora Switch Complete
6. My Desktop after Eight Years
7. I Will Pass on Time Travel
8. Citizen Science
9. On Aging
10. The Trick to Social Media
11. On Conservatives
12. Lullabies and Mixtapes
13. More Hard
14. Somewhat Automated
15. The Dark, Hard Days
16. On Buddies
17. Three Quarters of a Year
18. On Fezzik
19. On Ebooks
20. A Good Read
21. Let's Dance
22. On Sudoku
23. On Carrots
24. Primate Lessons
25. On Solace
26. Surreality Polarity Reversal
27. Dear Mom
28. Not That 1984
29. On the Historical Person
30. A Pictorial List
31. On Covid19 and Keystone Species
32. s/awk/R/
33. s/sed/awk/
34. On Marriage
35. On Teaching Linux
36. Dark Nights
37. On Revising
38. On Distractions
39. A Distro Hop
40. On Conspiracy Theories
41. Earth's Holocaust
42. Come Sail Away
43. On the Bookshelf
44. The Chronicles
45. Past Colleagues
46. On Consistency
47. Restaurant Dreams
48. 35 Days
49. An Action Under Which Description
50. The Slow Down
51. I'd Rather
52. It's the Little Things
53. On Research Speed
54. On Stress Relief
55. On Sheltering
56. On Social Distancing
57. Losing a Walker Friend
58. When a Baby Cries as a Toddler
59. Converting Markdown to HTML with Table of Contents Using Pandoc
60. Switching Window Managers
61. Remembering Some Text
62. Some Observations on Usability Pertaining to a Child
63. Bad Superblock
64. A Quick Bash One-Liner and Children
65. Tidyverse Skeptic Too
66. Make Email Fun
67. Some Routines I Find Calming
68. The Product
69. The Walkers
70. On Solitude
71. On Writing and its Tools
72. Using Ed, The Standard Text Editor
73. Keeping it Minimal