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