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

Email: sean.burns@uky.edu or sean.csb@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cseanburns
GitHub: https://github.com/cseanburns

Research

Recent Publications

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

I published a research paper on What documents cannot do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi and the tacit knowledge dilemma in Information & Culture. 2021. Please use the Open Access (Post Print version) if needed.

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

Submitted Manuscripts

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