Abstract
The study of accounting history has long provided critical insights into the emergence and evolution of accounting practices, bodies, and practitioners, shedding light on their roles in shaping organisations, institutions, economies, and societies. This special issue of Accounting History is dedicated to exploring how digitalisation is reshaping the ways accounting historians can study, investigate, interpret, understand, and explain the historical trajectories of accounting. This theme is both significant and timely. The digital revolution currently taking place in plain sight, with developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) dominating thinking in ways never anticipated, is not only redefining contemporary accounting practices but also offers unprecedented opportunities and challenges for accounting historians.
Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, accounting history research has relied heavily on analogue sources and traditional methodologies. While these have yielded invaluable knowledge, investigation is often constrained by the practical limitations of physical records, archives, manual analysis, and linguistic barriers. Digitalisation and digitisation break through many of these constraints, enabling researchers to access, process, and analyse vast troves of data that were previously virtually unusable or beyond reach due to their unwieldy complexity; being too time-consuming to unravel; or when doing so required skills lost or never acquired. In dedicating this special issue to accounting history in the digital age, we sought to spotlight the innovative approaches, tools, and methodologies that digitalisation and digitisation offer to accounting historians, as well as the fresh insights their adoption has already begun to generate.
The significance of this special issue lies in its recognition of digitalisation and digitisation as both a methodological revolution and a redefining of the possibilities of historical accounting research. Digital tools and technologies – ranging from high-resolution imaging, optical character recognition (OCR), handwriting recognition, and machine translation to large-scale textual analysis and data visualisation – are reshaping the way accounting historians access, interpret, and disseminate archival materials and other sources, both primary and secondary. This special issue not only highlights these innovations but also examines their implications for accounting history.
The timeliness of this issue is underscored by two converging developments. The ongoing digitisation of archival collections and historical documents, accelerated by global initiatives to preserve cultural heritage, has created unprecedented opportunities for research. Historical accounting materials that were once geographically and linguistically inaccessible are now available to scholars worldwide. This democratisation of access has the potential to broaden the scope of accounting history, fostering comparative and transnational perspectives while integrating underexplored contexts and voices. Secondly, the very evident growing capabilities and new developments of technologies enable accounting historians to work at scales and at levels of detail that were previously unimaginable.
Through techniques such as network analysis, machine learning, and computerised content analysis, patterns, anomalies, and connections can be identified across vast corpora of historical documents; accounting systems can be modelled and compared, and motivations for their design explored. These developments do not merely enhance efficiency in historical research. They open up new possibilities for accounting history research to expand, revisit, and revitalise, consider research questions that have remained unexplored, and critically explore what was previously beyond both reach and mind.
Yet digitalisation is not without its challenges. The risk of overreliance on imperfect technologies, the uneven quality of digitised archives, and the need for technical expertise all demand a critical and reflective approach. Furthermore, the shift towards digital methods and technologies raises profound questions about the preservation of digital archives and the ethical considerations of accessing and analysing historical data.
As accounting history navigates this transformative period, the need for multi-disciplinary collaboration, critical engagement, and methodological innovation has never been greater. By engaging with the promises and pitfalls of digitalisation and digitisation, this special issue aims to inspire the adoption of insightful and innovative methodologies, processing of sources, research, and greatly enrich dialogue and understanding in and of the field. It represents an invitation to scholars, practitioners, and archivists alike to embrace the opportunities of the digital era while remaining mindful of its complexities. By doing so, we can ensure that the rich history of accounting continues to inform and inspire future generations of accounting historians.
The articles included in this special issue demonstrate how digital tools can illuminate historical accounting practices, challenge established narratives and expand the horizons of inquiry. Together, they offer a compelling vision of what it means to study accounting history in the digital age.
Sangster (2025). ‘Going digital’ – its place in research into the history of modern accounting
Adopting an autobiographical lens, Alan Sangster reflects on his personal journey as a digital historian and makes a compelling case for accounting historians to embrace digital technologies in their research. The article proposes that digitalisation and digitisation can significantly enhance the quality, depth, and efficiency of historical investigations, addressing longstanding limitations in historical accounting research. Illustrations are provided of how accounting historians can engage with underrepresented historical contexts, such as medieval and early modern records in Italian and other languages, thereby broadening the scope of inquiry. Acknowledging hitherto reliance by accounting historians on analogue methods, the author demonstrates how ‘going digital’ enables historians to access, search, and translate vast repositories of archival material previously inaccessible or impractical to analyse, thereby opening up broader historical contexts and sources, particularly in languages other than that of the individual historian. While proposing that ‘going digital’ improves the efficiency, accessibility, and depth of insights in accounting history research, risks that those adopting a digital approach will face are highlighted, including poor-quality digitisation, errors in machine translation, and overreliance on digital tools.
Quinn and Murphy (2025). Accounting history in a digital age: Empirical experiences, improving methods, and unlocking new research avenues
In a similar vein, Martin Quinn and Brid Murphy explore the transformative potential of digitalisation for accounting history research, focusing on the use of digital tools to enhance research processes and generate new insights. They argue that digitalisation enables accounting historians to access broader sources, improve efficiency, and adopt innovative methodologies. To support their argument, they present two historical case studies where digital sources and tools were employed: the Guinness Brewery and the Magdalene Laundry. The authors demonstrate how digitalisation of their research methodology facilitated faster and more systematic analysis of archival materials, enabled richer reconstructions of financial models through the triangulation of digital sources, and prompted interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies, such as content analysis, offering new ways to address historical research questions. As with Sangster (2025), this article serves as a call for greater use of digital tools and sources, with the aim of modernising and revitalising accounting history research. While acknowledging the existence of several challenges – including the risks of incomplete digitisation, digital obsolescence, and the necessity for researchers to develop technical skills – the authors conclude that digitalisation opens avenues for more rigorous, reflective, and relevant historical research.
Kuter, Sangster, Gurskaya, Lugovsky and Evtykh (2025). Digitalising medieval accounting research: Andrea Barbarigo’s Venetian Cash Account 1430–1434
Digital tools can also assist in identifying anomalies and errors in archival documents that would be impracticable to detect manually. In their study of a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant, Andrea Barbarigo, and his journal and ledger, Kuter et al. employ an innovative digital research methodology to examine bookkeeping practices in Venice from which, in the form codified by Luca Pacioli in 1494, the foundations of modern accounting were shaped. Using computerised technologies, the authors analysed Barbarigo's account books and identified anomalies, such as a cash account during a four-year period that had a credit balance on three occasions totalling almost a year; and a two-month period during which the use of the journal ceased as the business appeared to be contracting, only for this to be reversed and the journal to return into use. The findings presented in the article challenge traditional assumptions about the role of bookkeeping in medieval commerce and offer fresh insights into early accounting methods. The digitalised methodology adopted by the authors not only expedited the analysis but also demonstrated the potential to uncover many aspects of accounting practices that would have remained unexplored without the support of digitalisation and digitisation.
Karelskaia and Zuga (2025). Study of Russian accounting documents on birch bark from the 11th to the15th century using the digital archive
The accessibility afforded by digitalisation may enable studies that were previously virtually impossible. The article by Svetlana Karelskaia and Ekaterina Zuga provides a rare example of how digital illustrations of birch bark documents have facilitated the investigation of accounting practices in Russia between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. In Russia, birch bark documents represent an intermediate stage between the low amount of detail recorded on tally sticks and the detailed entries in ledgers. Relying on digital illustrations, 1,223 medieval birch bark documents were analysed. Accounting methods were identified that resembled or resonated with subsequent Russian practices from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries before the adoption in Russia of accounting using the double-entry method. The birch bark records revealed organised accounts relating to taxes, property, and commerce, illustrating the development of commodity-money relations in medieval Russia. Despite their small scale and reliance on tabular formats due to limitations inherent in the medium of birch bark, these practices endured, reflecting Russia's isolation from European influences. The findings align with historical trends in early European bookkeeping while showcasing distinct local adaptations.
Kurtz and Flesher (2025). Creating a large open-access digital accounting resource: The University of Mississippi's eGrove accounting collection
While it is evident that using digital tools and sources can be beneficial for accounting history research, it is equally true that sources must first be digitised, a process requiring considerable time and effort. In their article, Royce Kurtz and Dale Flesher provide an impressive account of the development of eGrove, a significant open-access digital resource created by the University of Mississippi (UM). eGrove houses over 20,000 accounting-related digitised items and up to one million pages of searchable text. This initiative began with UM's acquisition of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) library in 2001, followed by its systematic digitisation. Supported by grants and collaborations with organisations such as the accounting firm, Deloitte, and the Academy of Accounting Historians, the project has digitised a wide range of historical and contemporary materials, including century-old pamphlets and modern born-digital content. The authors describe how the initiative was not without challenges. These included copyright negotiations, evolving software formats, and technical difficulties with OCR processing. Nevertheless, user analytics reveal widespread global use, with over 58 per cent of downloads originating outside the United States, particularly benefiting scholars and practitioners in developing economies. This effort is ongoing, as a digital archive requires continuous maintenance, expansion of access, adaptation to digital evolution, and monitoring of data longevity issues. UM's endeavour exemplifies how digital transformation can preserve and democratise access to specialised academic resources, providing valuable materials for the further development of accounting history research.
Saxton, Rahaman, Neu and Taylor-Neu (2025). The ethical CPA: Journal of Accountancy letters to the editor
Digitalisation in accounting history does not necessarily mean relying solely on digital sources but also encompasses the use of digital and computerised tools. In their study on the ethics of CPA practitioners, Saxton et al. analysed 1,769 letters to the editor published in the Journal of Accountancy between 1951 and 2020. The letters provided a unique perspective on evolving concerns within the accounting profession, including references to ethical concepts such as duty, integrity, and fairness. The study reported in this article employed computerised text analysis to examine how CPA practitioners articulated their views on professional practice. By identifying recurring topics, social characters, and discursive communities, the article maps the structure of professional discourse and underscores the centrality of ethics in these narratives. The analysis highlights two primary discursive communities: one centred on CPA education, practice, and client relationships; the other focused on auditing, external stakeholders, and ethical dilemmas. While offering new insights into the ethical content of CPA discourses over 70 years of practice, the article also demonstrates the immense potential of digital tools for analysing historical materials which, in this case, uncovered aggregate-level patterns that enhance our understanding of accounting practices of the past.