Encoding Financial Records

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction¹

“[A]ccount books,” business historian Judith McGaw noted in 1985, “are among the most common but least accessible primary sources for historians….” In the intervening twenty-seven years, historians have made use of these rich sources to produce a range of articles and monographs, but few digitization projects have tackled financial records directly.²

Some standardized electronic data has long been available to social science historians. The Minnesota Population Center’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series provides harmonized data for U.S. and international population studies. The National Historic Geographic System provides data for United States historical geography, as does the Great Britain Historical Geographic Information System for Britain. A current initiative of the European Science Foundation, the European Historical Population Samples Network, seeks “to create a common format for databases containing information on persons, families and households.” And while a strong tradition of monographs and journals in economic history has resulted from investigation of archival financial records, no comparable project exists for their digitization.³

Encoding Historical Financial Records

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

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Abstract

A significant number of scholars in Europe and North America are now involved in projects utilizing or encoding historical financial and tabular records. Many of them hope that it will be possible to develop guidelines that account for both the idiosyncrasies of such manuscripts and the semantic information embedded in them.

Historical financial records (HFRs), a genre of primary sources that includes such materials as bills, receipts, cashbooks, journals, and account ledgers, are abundant in traditional archives. Most current digitization projects do not capture the full range of financial information, and if they do, they have yet to develop a common method for fully expressing this range.

Ktomasek on Journal of Digital Humanities

Encoding Financial Records

Introduction1

Encoding Historical Financial Records

Poster

Abstract

Introduction¹