About
Dr. Beshero-Bondar
I grew up while the web was being born, and I've been adventuring in digital humanities for the past decade. Text and web tech is my medium in DIGIT! I teach classes that take up text like it's a textile, and weave it into structures on digital looms to build a web and work it into multimedia. I delight in tinkering with broken code, exploring stylesheets and JavaScript, and fixing broken markup and Python scripts. You'll hear me go on about "best practices" in trying to design projects just right to outlast moody tech trends, and I love nothing more than keeping projects alive and rescuing old digital projects from falling off the internets into link algorithmic and ruin. I'm the Program Chair of DIGIT which means I have to make sense of our class schedules from semester to semester and do a ton of work making sure things run smooth for us!
The picture is me in my office—where I meet with lots of DIGIT students and teams on projects, which is my favorite thing to do in DIGIT!
Dr. Elliott
Dr. Elliott is our data visualization professor. She loves all things data. She loves it so much that she teaches about data in our psychology program and in our functional data analytics program too! Dr. Elliott discovered a love of data in graduate school at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA. There, she earned a PhD in experimental psychology/engineering psychology. Dr. Elliott also does research in human factors, human computer interaction, and the modeling of human behavior. When Dr. Elliott isn’t at work, she enjoys fixing up her old house, playing with her dog- Kitty Cupcake Mittens, and knitting.
Joel V. Hunt, Ph. D.
Joel V. Hunt, Ph.D., is a versatile composer, performer, educator, and scholar with interests spanning jazz, popular music, interactive electroacoustic music, and algorithmic computer music. His recent creative output includes audiovisual installations, modular synthesizer improvisations, generative computer music, and video game music for concert band. His music has been featured at festivals throughout the US and Europe, including the International Computer Music Conference, New York City Electronic Music Festival, Society of Composers Inc., Electroacoustic Barn Dance, Electronic Music Midwest, Primavera Festival of Contemporary Arts and Digital Media, California Electronic Music Exchange Series, and the Ethos NewSound Festival of Contemporary Music.
Dr. Hunt's research and teaching interests encompass electronic music history, data sonification, computational analysis, jazz-pop theory, and sketch studies. His scholarship focuses on the evolution of compositional process in the music of American experimental composer Henry Brant. He has presented his research at meetings of the Society for American Music, Society for Music Theory, Tracking the Creative Process in Music Conference, Canadian University Music Society, and the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis.
Dr. Hunt is also an accomplished jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and arranger. Currently, he is recording new works for saxophone and electronics and composing for modular synthesizer and robotic drums.
Tommy Hartung
I am a digital artist and educator whose work employs accessible means and equipment to create digital animation and photography. After graduating from Columbia University with an M.F.A, my experimentalist techniques "are against the grain of current computer-generated animation spectacles," as noted by art critic Ken Johnson of the New York Times. My work exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum, MoMA, Rotterdam Film Festival, and PBS Art:21 created several short documentaries on my life and work. I have taught for S.U.N.Y. Purchase and New York University for eight years before teaching at Penn State throughout these commercial, artistic accomplishments.