An Innovative Decade of Enduring Accounting Ideas as Seen through the Lens of Culturomics: 1900-1910

ABSTRACTCulturomics is a new field of study to investigate how use of a word or phrase has changed over the past few centuries. We use the Culturomics approach to describe the temporal changes in the evolution of accounting thought. This is now possible as more and more books are being scanned and texts digitized. With digitization, it is possible to apply quantitative analysis to diverse fields in novel ways. We document the trajectories of terms that define the accounting field and our initial interpretations of them. Our analysis reveals that the ten-year period, from 1900 to 1910, stands out as a fertile period of innovative accounting ideas that endure to this day.Keywords: Culturomics, Corpus, Digitized texts, Accounting thought, Linguistic evolutionIntroductionCulturomics is a new field of study to investigate how usage frequency of a word or phrase has changed over the past few centuries. The words written in books narrate the history of social science and humanities. Using the Culturomics approach, this paper will describe and report on the temporal changes in the evolution of accounting thought. This is now possible as more and more books are being scanned and texts digitized. With this new approach, quantitative analysis can be applied in novel ways to diverse fields. We document the trajectories of terms that define the field of accounting and our initial interpretations. We find that during a ten year period (1900-1910), many important managerial accounting concepts (e.g., break-even analysis, gross margin), financial accounting principles (e.g., revenue recognition, matching), and analytical ratios (e.g., earnings per share) were first introduced to a wider swath of readers.The Google Labs n-gram ViewerIn December 2010, Google launched Its Google Books Ngram Viewer, a research engine that enables people to explore cultural history by statistically analyzing the world's books. Users can research how popular certain words and phrases have been over several centuries, based on their appearance in books. Jon Orwant, from the Google Books team describes the process as "the datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year.(...) The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years."Single words represent a 1-gram while phrases are described as n-gram where n = the number of words in a phrase. Entry of a single word or non-word or a multi-word phrase results in a time-series graph showing the prevalence of that term or phrase for each year between 1800 and 2000.This simple online tool allows users to search different collections of books, called "corpora" to see cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books. We use this tool to examine trends in the accounting field since the 1800s.The CorporaIn 2010, the Economist reported that Google has digitized 15 million books printed since the 15th century. This massive electronic library represents 12% of all the books ever published. Jean-Baptiste Michel of Harvard and his team shaved the digitized collection down to just over 5 million volumes for which reasonably accurate bibliographic data including the date and place of publication, were available. Their focus was mainly on English books between 1800 and 2000. Periodicals were excluded. That yielded a corpus of over 500 billion 1-grams.Different collections of books represent the corpora; Corpora are available in English, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Spanish. Users are able to examine words and phrases from each corpus so as to compare the time-series usage of words and phrases between languages. All of these corpora were generated in July 2007 and are expected to be updated as the book scanning continues. Distinct persistent identifiers will accompany each updated versions.The Culturomics ApproachJean-Baptiste Michel, et. …