Interview with Prof. Dr Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex)

In this interview, Professor Tim Hitchcock describes his beginnings as an historian in British social history and how he became involved in the field of digital humanities. He explains how he started with Robert Shoemaker in the late 1990’s big digitization projects like “Old Bailey online” (The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913). He emphasizes also the role of digital history in connection with the history from below in the United Kingdom and public history in the United States.

Tim Hitchcock also criticizes the way in which a lot of historians meet the digital challenge and underlines the importance of the use of digital tools in the undergraduates curriculum in the University of Sussex. He also explains the interactions between close reading and distant reading, how historians nowadays deal with it, and describes the perspectives for digital history in the future.