A Distant Reader

Interview with Ivan Horvath

Abstract

Iván Horváth (1948–2024), professor emeritus of ELTE was one of Hungary’s leading literary scientists, an internationally pioneering scholar of digital humanities, engaged, as early as the seventies, in computer-aided literary studies—a field he would later call humanities informatics. He was a prominent researcher of Bálint Balassi and of early Hungarian literature and a major figure in the publication and interpretation of Attila József’s oeuvre. He was active as a public intellectual
during the years of Hungary’s democratic transition, he was a founding editor of the journal 2000. Professor Horváth was also a noted HiFi enthusiast and expert, and one of the initiators of the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society of Hungary. The interview with Iván Horváth was conducted in 2023 and published in English in Disegno, the Journal of design culture.