Artfictions: A Dataset of Contemporary Spanish and Portuguese Novels on Artistic and Visual Creativity

Overview

The Artfictions dataset catalogues 961 contemporary novels written primarily in Spanish and Portuguese that engage with themes of artistic and visual creativity. This dataset was compiled to support research in comparative literature, cultural studies, and digital humanities. It provides extensive bibliographic metadata about creative narratives across 30 countries, offering insight into publishing diversity and alternative cultural production.

The dataset was created after careful examination of the catalogue of hundreds of literary presses based in Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula and Portuguese-speaking Africa. The types of documents gathered in the dataset correspond to fictional work in the novel form published over the 21^st century and which fulfilled the following requirements: engaged with contemporary art and visual creativity; addressed issues related to the impact of precariousness and productivist ideologies within cultural production (Brouillette, 2014) and creative and artistic capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2018; Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2013); and examined artistic practices and processes from the perspective of the art novel, which is here understood as an evolution of the artist novel tradition in which contemporary creativity is expanded and presented as a force as well as a form of social reproduction (Garrido Castellano, 2023).

The main purpose of the dataset is to expand and complement close analysis through a comparative lens that remains attentive to plurilingual and multi-continental synergies. Special attention has been given to presses located outside of the major centres of literary circulation and production within Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking territories. In this sense, the Artfictions dataset engages and expands existing scholarship (Müller & Loy, 2023; Moraña & Gallego Cuiñas, 2023; Gallego Cuiñas & Torres-Salinas, 2024; Gallego Cuiñas & Pérez Tapias, 2022; EcoEdit; Hablemos Escritoras) seeking to highlight the importance of marginalised voices within the territories of study. It also builds on long-standing digital-humanities initiatives such as the Women Writers Project, which have demonstrated the value of curating structured literary datasets. Such projects, together with the methodological approaches advanced by scholars such as Franco Moretti (2013), Matthew Jockers (2013), and Katherine Bode (2018), provide important methodological precedents for the design and documentation of Artfictions. Comparable multilingual and cross-cultural literary databases, including initiatives emerging from the multilingual DH community and various world literature corpus projects (see Sánchez Prado, 2021; Locane, 2019), similarly inform this dataset’s commitment to representing diverse geolinguistic and editorial contexts.

Metadata was gathered manually by the research team through close reading of primary texts, consultation of secondary sources, and verification against bibliographic databases and publishers’ catalogues. No automated or semi-automated extraction methods were used; all records were curated through expert judgement to ensure accuracy, consistency, and contextual relevance across the dataset.

The dataset will be expanded and updated over the next two years to further examine less studied contexts and reflect the evolution of the literary system in the near future.

Repository Location

The dataset is openly accessible via GitHub:

https://artfictions.github.io/

The dataset has also been deposited in Zenodo and is openly accessible via DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15754883

Context

The creation of this dataset was undertaken as part of the Irish Research Council (IRC) Laureate Consolidator Project entitled Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds (ARTFICTIONS), led by Principal Investigator, Dr. Carlos Garrido Castellano. The project is documenting and analysing contemporary narrative examples engaging with artistic creativity in 24 Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking territories across Latin America, the Caribbean, the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and Asia.

The dataset will allow for comparative analysis of the ways in which contemporary writers are reimagining and repurposing artistic creativity in relation to crucial issues of environmental crisis, precarisation, and neoliberalism. This is crucial, as most of the studies of art novels have been limited to European and Northern American contexts as well as to fictional work mainly produced in English, French, and German.

The main aim of ARTFICTIONS is to assess the relevance of artistic creativity and creative paradigm for the definition of contemporary societies. ARTFICTIONS examines narratives and stories about creativity produced at a time when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition, and collective imagination. The project advances a new global paradigm for the analysis of literary fictions concerned with artistic creativity and cultural production under creative and artistic capitalism. Although its original focus is on contemporary fiction written in Spanish and Portuguese in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, the project also engages with a wide diversity of creative strategies emerging from multiple contexts and seeking to challenge neoliberal understandings of cultural production.

The dataset is intended as a resource for further scholarly research and as a foundation for related publications and public humanities outputs. These include two monographs (Garrido Castellano, 2023, 2026) and several edited projects on aspects such as cultural creativity and placemaking in Brazil (Dalcastagnè, Garrido Castellano & Albuquerque, 2023), artistic creativity and democratisation in the context of the Spanish state, the relationship between crisis, cultural production, precariousness and financial speculation in contemporary Portugal, alternative understandings and genealogies of artistic modernism in the Caribbean, creative entrepreneurialism in the Americas, the materiality of cultural production in the Portuguese-speaking world (Garrido Castellano, 2025), popular mobilisation and artistic imperatives, and the importance of anticolonial aesthetics for contemporary sociopolitical mobilisation (Garrido Castellano & Crowley, 2025).

Method

The dataset was developed through a systematic process of bibliographic mapping and manual data collection that gave special attention to small-scale and writers-managed presses located outside the main centres of literary production and circulation. Initial identification of relevant novels drew on national library catalogues, publisher catalogues (both mainstream and independent), prize lists, academic bibliographies, and specialist literary journals. Records were consolidated into a master list, from which metadata were extracted and standardised.

All records were structured consistently to include fields such as title, author, publisher, year of publication, country, language, and up to five thematic descriptors. The dataset was exported in JSON format to maximise interoperability with other research tools.

Rather than employing a statistical sampling method, the project followed an exhaustive approach, aiming to comprehensively record novels that thematise artistic and visual creativity published since 2000 in Spanish and Portuguese. These include novels featuring visual artists, curators, museums, art biennials and the art market. At the same time, Artfictions decided to pay attention to novels that engage with artmaking and artistic and creative subjectivity in broader ways. This is a conscious way of responding to the overlapping of multiple concerns and literary and artistic strategies within the examined regions.

The only exceptions allowed to these criteria were made to highlight a handful of key texts published before that date that shaped the literary imagination in specific territories, and to include hybrid texts that fall outside of the novel genre. These exceptions are minimal and serve the purpose of completing national genealogies in which a key novel was crucial for writers producing work in the 21^st century.

The dataset includes covers a wide range of publishing houses from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, ranging from transnational conglomerates to small-scale, city-based publishers, and including all sorts of cases in between. Quality assurance measures were applied throughout the data collection and preparation stages. Metadata were cross-checked against multiple sources (e.g., ISBN records, publisher sites, bibliographic databases) to verify accuracy and consistency. Thematic descriptors were standardised to a customised controlled vocabulary, represented in the dataset as “Themes”. Example themes include “Architecture”, “Celebrity Culture”, “Cinema”, “Dance”, “Food”, “Migration”, “Performance”, “Radio”, and “Transgender”. Each theme is further developed in the project’s website through direct engagement with literary examples from the studied contexts. This controlled vocabulary was developed through critical judgement rather than automated clustering, ensuring that thematic categories reflect interpretive nuance and scholarly understanding of each work’s engagement with artistic and visual creativity. Where publication dates, author names, or publisher details were incomplete or ambiguous, further verification was undertaken through secondary reference materials.

Dataset Description

Reuse Potential

The Artfictions dataset holds significant potential for interdisciplinary reuse. Scholars in literary studies can employ the dataset to analyse trends in cultural production, artistic representation, and thematic diversity across Iberian and Latin American fiction. The dataset has potential to complement projects related to contemporary creativity in the Americas and Africa, research on literary and artistic circulation, initiatives seeking to map cultural practices beyond Western-centric paradigms, and studies of global approaches to creative and cultural labour.

Digital humanists may integrate the dataset into visualisation projects, network analyses, or bibliometric studies, as demonstrated in the project’s existing data and network visualisations. While the dataset does not model direct relational data between authors or works, the included network visualisations are intended as exploratory tools that highlight shared thematic, linguistic, and geographic dimensions rather than formal network structures. These visualisations are designed to illustrate patterns of co-occurrence among themes and publishing contexts, offering an interpretive rather than strictly quantitative representation of connections within the dataset. The structured JSON format enables straightforward transformation into other formats (e.g., CSV, RDF) for integration with digital platforms or linked data initiatives. The structured JSON format enables straightforward transformation into other formats (e.g., CSV, RDF) for integration with digital platforms or linked data initiatives.

Educators can use the dataset as a resource in courses addressing contemporary literature, cultural policy, and the sociology of publishing. Additionally, the dataset offers a valuable reference point for researchers interested in bibliodiversity and the documentation of small-scale and independent presses.

Potential limitations for reuse include the possibility of incomplete records for certain lesser-known works and the reliance on publicly accessible bibliographic sources, which may occasionally contain inconsistencies. However, the controlled thematic vocabulary and systematic quality checks mitigate many of these risks. Users are encouraged to cite the dataset DOI and acknowledge the creators when reusing the resource in any form.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Author Contributions

Carlos Garrido Castellano: Conceptualization, Bibliographic Research, Data Collection, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing.

James O’Sullivan: Data Curation, Dataset Preparation, Web Development, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review & Editing.

Carla Almanza-Gálvez: Bibliographic Research, Data Collection, Review & Editing.

Fernanda Barini Camargo: Data Collection, Review & Editing.

Flavia Pontes Espindola: Data Collection, Review & Editing.

Beatriz Dantas Vieira: Data Collection, Review & Editing.