Twitter: @cseanburns | GitHub: @cseanburns | ORCID: 0000-0001-8695-3643 | The Text RSS feed

Research

Basic Gist

I work as an associate professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky's College of Communication and Information.

In this position, I am presently working on two research projects. The first project is a study of tacit knowledge and open science. In particular, my thesis is that tacit knowing, Michael Polanyi's idea that we can know more than we can tell, challenges the idea that an open science can be fully open. If true, this has ramifications for what we can learn from science done more openly and for what can be replicated based on a more open science.

The second project is a study on document credibility. Here I am interested in what aspects of a document, in particular, news documents and articles, influence how people judge its credibility.

Recent Publications

Mixed findings in directly replicated experimental studies on fake news in First Monday, with Renee Kaufmann and Anthony Limperos. 2021.

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).

Teaching

Undergraduate

I regularly teach the following two undergraduate courses in my School's information, communication, and technology (ICT) program.

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

I regularly teach the following two graduate courses in my School's library science (LIS) and information, communication, and technology (ICT) programs.

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.

Miscellany

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.

Random Essay and Note Topics

These are located on my wiki:

The Text, Please. Just the Text.

Short Comments, Essays, Etc.

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