Who We Are

B

Photo of Elisa Beshero-Bondar

Elisa Beshero-Bondar

she/they

Founding member

I'm Elisa Beshero-Bondar, an adventurer in the webs of Digital Humanities. I'm Professor of Digital Humanities at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College where I teach in the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology ("Digit") program.

TEI logo: white letters T-E-I on a black square, overlaid on an orange square

TEI

I'm active with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and enjoy helping to develop TEI projects to share cultural heritage resources. I'm also very interested in sustainability, digital data history and re-mediating digital projects and data for the future, keeping them "alive" after their software ceases to exist.

Stylized mosaic illustration of a firebelly newt in orange, black, and brown polygon shapes, reaching upward with a long curled tail.

newtFire

You can find the DH projects I've been working on, including a lot of DH class materials woven into my website https://newtfire.org, named for my pet firebelly newts.

Four puzzle-piece-shaped colored panels (green, blue, orange, and magenta) each showing an engraved portrait fragment of Mary Russell Mitford; when assembled would show her writing with a quill pen.

Digital Mitford

Digital Mitford is one of my earliest DH projects, founded in April 2013 with a wonderful team of 19th-century literary scholars. It's due for a blast of new material and a new interface, for which I am taking a sabbatical in Spring 2027 to work on!

Photo of Greg Bondar

Greg Bondar

Member; Adjunct Lecturer of History and Anthropology, Penn State Erie/Behrend

I am an archaeologist at Penn State Erie/Behrend who works as the Surveyor for the Tell Timai Archaeological Project in Egypt, and the Petra Garden and Pool Complex at Petra, Jordan, creating digital maps and 3D models of these sites. I am also the 'Manuscript Archaeologist' for the Digital MItford, where I have constructed, and continue to maintain, the database of manuscript letters of Mary Russell Mitford. As such, I have taken a few thousand photographs of these manuscript letters, mainly in British archives, and have sought to understand their varieties of postmarks. Besides courses in Anthropology, Archaeology, History, 'Science, Technology, and Society,' and Geography, I have taught courses in Web Development, XML markup, XSLT, Xquery, Schemas, RegEx, HTML, etc. I will use generative AI reluctantly and warily, and disclose such use so one knows who to blame!

Postal clerks stamping letters in the central London Post Office.

The Postmarks of Mary Russell Mitford's Letters

An ongoing study to understand, catalog, and encode the postmarks on the early 19th-century manuscript correspondence of Mary Russell Mitford.

Tell Timai Archaeological Project Patch showing the famous circular mosaic of Arsinoe the Second's head wearing a trireme ship as a hat from the Alexandria Museum.

Tell Timai Archaeological Project

Archaeology project at Tell Timai in Egypt on the Nile Delta!

G

Photo of Ella

Ella

she/her

Current Digital Media, Arts and Technology student

L

Photo of Lauren Liebe

Lauren Liebe

they/she

Founding member, Assistant Teaching Professor of Game Studies and Digital Humanities at Penn State Behrend

"VARIA" in stylized neon lettering, pink and white text on a purple background.

Virtual and Augmented Reality and Interactive Arts Lab (VARIA)

T

Random Test

testing alphabetizing

stuff