The format and contents of the corporate graph file

The format of the files provided with this paper is comma separated value (CSV) format. This is a plain text format that is usable in spreadsheets and most network visualization and analysis programs. The data files are also available on the author’s website (http://jgmackay.com) in other file formats, including graph exchange format (GEXF), which is an open graph format supported by many popular network analysis software packages. This standard was developed by the Gephi consortium and supported by Gephi network visualization software, which is freely available (Bastian et al., 2009). The GEXF file format has been designed to be open and work with a variety of software packages.

Information about attributes

Table 1 lists the attributes of nodes and edges that exist in the graph files and includes a brief explanation of the attribute.

Table 1

Attributes in graph files

The format and contents of the person graph file

The graph file containing corporate executives and directors from the DoD has the firms as edges and the nodes as people. This file contains location data (longitude and latitude pairs) for both individuals and the firms they worked for. Additionally, there is information about the province and city each individual was located in. Perhaps of most interest for historians of the period are the fields with the full names of individuals. This allows researchers to construct sociograms of the elites of Canadian business of the day. Additional historical background and information about regional elites based on this data is also available (MacKay, 2016).

Limitations

The key limitations of the data presented here have already been alluded to; it is unknown whether the DoD is representative of all of the public companies in Canada at the time, or whether it was biased toward companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. At the time, Montreal was the home of the major stock exchange, although Toronto was also considered a major center. It seems reasonable to assume that W.R. Houston would not overlook major firms listed in Montreal. However, he may not have been aware of a number of companies that were listed in Winnipeg. The preface to the DoD makes it clear that there were a number of non-responses to Houston’s survey of directors of public companies in Canada. However, these limitations are perhaps forgivable given that there does not exist a canonical list of Canadian public companies from this period. Although imperfect, the DoD provides one of the most complete listings of directors and firms from that period (for discussion of these points, see MacKay, 2016).

The data used to create the graph files were extracted using optical character recognition (OCR) software from electronic versions of the DoD and then manually corrected by the author and assistants. Ultimately assigning a tie between nodes in the graphs relies upon the names being listed consistently throughout the DoD. It is also assumed that the OCR and text cleaning process found and corrected any mis-spellings so that the common ties could be correctly created. Every attempt has been made to clean and translate the data appropriately.

Conclusion

This paper has presented an overview of two projections of graphs based on information extracted from the DoD. The graph files have been created, so that they are easily usable by non-specialists. Additional information has also been added, which makes integrating these networks with Canadian national census data from 1911 possible or plotting locations of directors or companies using longitude and latitude pairs. It is hoped that this information will be of use to both business historians and network scholars.