Accounting for Accounting History : An Exploratory Study Through Topic Modeling Approach

This paper contributes to the growing history of accounting history by analysing the contents of all papers published in Accounting History, one among the leading journals of the field, through a recent and promising analytical technique called Topic Modeling. Based on literature, we know what accounting history is about, but we know less how the accounting history field has evolved. By adopting Topic Modeling, an automated procedure for coding the content of corpus of text based on Bayesian statistic, the paper complements prior assessments of the accounting history literature by providing accurate measures about the relative prevalence of research areas and their evolution over time. The analysis highlights three sets of topics not uncovered by previous categorizations. In particular, the ‘Regulation' topic, that refers to international accounting standards and auditing regulation, appears to be overlooked by previous reviews. In terms of dynamics we find that the ‘Technical core of accounting' decreased in importance overtime in favour of more variegated and fragmented foci of research: this finding may substantiate the claimed shift from a conception of accounting as a technical practice to the one of accounting as a social practice, that is the transition from the so called ‘traditional' to ‘new' accounting history. Moreover, we see a pluralisation in the range of issues that are under the lenses of accounting historians. Finally, our analysis suggests that the way in which accounting history is presented or ‘talked about' has not changed much in the last 20 years