Timothy
Emmanuel
Brown

Assistant Professor
Department of Bioethics & Humanities

University of Washington, School of Medicine

Won grant to attend Digital Humanities Summer Institute

July 1st , 2018

A map—generated using the R programming language and various libraries—of fatal encounters with police with roadmap directions.

The University of Victoria hosts the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) to teach humanists to use technologies for research and pedagogy. Every year, University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities funds a group of students to attend. This year, they selected a group of philosophy graduate students to attend—me, Anna Bates, and Erika Versalovic—after reading our proposal, “Bringing Computers to Plato’s Cave: Using Digital Tools to Map Philosophical Discourse.” DHSI was an amazing experience: I made friends, learned to program in R, and took part in serious discussions about the role of technology in the humanities. As part of the course I completed at DHSI—Ethical Data Visualization: Taming Treacherous Data—I wrote software that maps the location of fatal encounters with police officers on top of directions for a trans-American roadtrip. For more of my thoughts about this project, take a look at this Twitter thread.

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Mentoring for the Inclusive Summer High School Institute for Philosophy (ISHIP) program

July 10th, 2017

ISHIP students sitting at the shore of a lake, staring out at the forest on the other side.

I just got back from Depauw University where I had the honor of mentoring students for their Inclusive Summer High School Institute for Philosophy (ISHIP) program. In this week-long program—organized by my friend and colleague, Andrea Sullivan-Clarke—we immersed a bright group of rising high school seniors in intense philosophical study. Joining me were the amazing Drs. Robin Demberoff (Yale) and Rachel McKinnon (College of Charleston).

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Neuroethics panel @ AwesomeCon

June 22nd , 2017

Three panelists—Dr. Suveen Mathaudhu, Tim Brown, and Katherine Pratt—share a laugh.

Sometimes neuroethics takes me places I never thought it would. This week, I was invited by the National Science Foundation to help host a panel at AwesomeCon—Washington, DC’s big comic con. This was the first comic convention I’ve been to in over a decade, and so it was great to come back in style! Our panel was titled, “The Human-Technology Frontier: To Enhancement and Beyond?” and I shared it with my labmate Katherine Pratt, Professor Suveen Mathaudhu, and Professor Dan Cosley. In it, we thought about the distinction between restoration and enhancement, the needs of people with disabilities, and the definition of humanity. Check out Live Science’s excellent coverage for more!

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