The African Short Stories Online dataset: an interview with Gilbert Braspenning

Gilbert Braspenning has recently published a dataset of 902 online African short stories and had donated that data to the ALMEDA project for inclusion in our database. 

Online publishing of African short stories and poetry has increased significantly in the last decade with online small magazines, literary journals, and blogs publishing works from across the continent and its diasporas. But online informal publishing remains beset by problems of sustainability. Online ventures are often under- or unfunded and driven by individuals who, despite their dedication and commitment, cannot maintain online publications without a paid team of employees. We see excellent blog and online small magazines emerge and disappear at a steady rate. 

With the capture of data about these texts, we at least have a digital placeholder in the event of sites being closed and their materials disappearing. Gilbert Braspenning’s dataset is a major contribution towards the future archive of African short stories. While the ALMEDA project has captured data on literary texts from some major online sites, such as Doek!, Lolwe and Brittle Paper, what makes Braspenning’s dataset unique is that he has collected this material from so many different sources over such a long period of time (between 2015 and the present). The URLs to these texts turn this dataset into a digital archive of African short stories, even though, because they have been collected over a long period of time, it is likely that not all the URLs are still active. 

ALMEDA’s Ashleigh Harris has been in conversation with Gilbert Braspenning about his dataset and his data donation to the ALMEDA project. 

Ashleigh Harris: I wonder if you could tell us about your background and how you came to be interested in African literature? 

Gilbert Braspenning: Yes. I was born in the Netherlands and I studied at Leiden University in the 1980s, where I earned an MA in African linguistics and literature with a focus on East Africa. After my studies I started working and did a variety of other jobs, including working as a tour guide in Kenya and Tanzania. Much of my work after my degree was focused on language policy. After that, I did administrative work at the Free University in Amsterdam, but this position had nothing to do with African literature or with African languages. Currently, I work as an international officer at the Karel de Grote University College in Antwerp, Belgium. 

AH: And throughout this time, you kept up your interest in African literature? 

GB: Yes, I always kept busy with African literature. I continued to read African literature and even started an online African bookshop, Black Label. Because this was a little niche, I didn’t earn any money from that venture, and it was a lot of work. I had also been writing book reviews of African literature for a long time and this interest developed into my creation of a newsletter and platform on African literature, drama and criticism, which was called Africa Book Link. I ran Africa Book Link, which also commissioned reviews and content by other authors, for ten years. I have recently brought the Africa Book Link project to a close, for several reasons, but mainly because my interest now is primarily in collecting data on African literature in view of a forthcoming database that I am planning on African fiction  

AH: I can see how your work as an avid reader and reviewer of African literature has led you to this current work you are undertaking on data collection. Can you tell us more about that? 

GB: So gradually, over the past 10 years or so, I spent more time collecting data than working on the Africa Book Link newsletter. But these two lines of work have happened alongside one another. Because of my interest in African literature, I subscribed to many publisher alerts, journal and magazine notifications and so on, and the idea of communicating what was new in African literature to other Africanists is what prompted me to start the newsletter. I also started to create a dataset on all the information about African literature that was coming into my mailbox through these publisher alerts and other sources. That dataset became the origin of the database I have now been working on for the last 10 years. [Editor: The African Short Stories Online dataset is just one collection of a much larger dataset that Braspenning has collected and is currently developing into a database.]

AH: So, at first the newsletter and the dataset was about collating and communicating, a large and fragmented body of information that was out there to interested readers and scholars?  

GB: Yes, because I saw that there were many platforms and journals and publications, but, as far as I knew,there was no platform that collected that information and then communicated it to potentially interested readers, such as Africanists and students. 

AH: I wonder if you could say a little more about the sources that you have used in collating your data? 

GB: Sure, I must say it has been a bit chaotic! In addition to the publication alerts I already mentioned, I have used multiple existing databases and online sources, such as Google Books, Google scholar, Goodreads and other review sites. I have also used university catalogues, such as the library catalogue of Leiden University, which was extremely helpful because it allowed me to download data in an Excel format. I also collected data from WorldCat [Editor: WorldCat is a global linked data platform for library holdings, including metadata on materials from thousands of libraries across the globe]. For book publications, I used publisher websites. 

AH: I recognise this problem: because the field is so vast and the sources so varied, one has to work a little chaotically. There isn’t a single method of collection that is adequate to the task of trying to capture the range of African literature being produced and circulated. But, why do we need a specific African literary database if big databases such as WorldCat and others already have a significant amount of data? 

GB: Yes, actually, sometimes I wonder why I’m creating a unique database for African literature when you can find so much material on these databases also. But in my opinion, a dedicated database specifically for African literature or fiction can allow the capture of more subject-specific data than these larger, more general, databases can capture. My data includes links to the actual materials as well as other information, such as the cultural and linguistic context that the texts are set in. You won’t get that kind of data in larger databases. 

AH: Online materials, unlike publisher data, are highly unstable in that websites are not often maintained, sites disappear, and their materials with them. This brings us to your new publication on online short stories. I wonder if you could tell us more about the dataset?  

GB: Yes, so initially I was mostly focused on novels and literary criticism, rather than short stories. But then I thought that short stories haven’t really been collected or indexed in a coherent dataset and yet I was seeing a lot of stories in small magazines and online platforms. It turned out to be a large dataset of 900 works, and I will be updating that dataset twice a year because new stories are being published online all the time. 

AH: I know that you are keen to work in collaboration with others, and I wonder if you want to say something about what kinds of cooperations you’re interested in for the future development of your broader data set?

GB: Yes, I would like to work with someone with better coverage of the French- and Portuguese speaking parts of Africa, because most of my data is Anglophone. I am also interested in working with people working on various African language literatures. [Editor: if anyone wants to be in touch with Gilbert for possible collaboration, please contact him at gilbert.braspenning@gmail.com]

AH: I have one last question for you, which is about what you will be focussing on next, now that you have published this dataset of online short stories? 

GB: Yes, I would like to focus on the things that have not been indexed before. So, one thing that I am interested in creating a dataset on is interviews with African writers or about African writing. There are many interviews published in online magazines, blogs or on YouTube and other social media channels, but these have not been indexed. I would also like to work on a dataset on novels or other fiction written in African languages. 

AH: I think that a dataset on both interviews and one which collates data on recent African-language fiction publications would be extremely useful and I hope that you will continue to collaborate with the ALMEDA project with those future initiatives. 

Gilbert Braspenning’s dataset is available on ALMEDA’s Open Research repository for download and reuse. Find it here: 

Braspenning, Gilbert. ‘African Short Stories Online’. Zenodo, 24 November 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17698737.