Artisanal Intelligence — 2024 Journals Catalog is Bespoke and Data-Driven 

The 2024 Journals Catalog showcases both the personal and analytical sides of Hopkins Press  

Each year, the Hopkins Press Journals Division produces a concept-driven catalog to serve as a keystone marketing tool for marketing the Hopkins Press Journals Division as a potential publisher for new and existing scholarly journals and to serve as a comprehensive reference for journal stakeholders, including editors, editorial boards, authors, students, libraries, and other academic institutions. 

This year’s catalog, titled Artisanal Intelligence, showcases the range of the 110 journals Hopkins Press publishes each year, spanning arts and humanities, technology and medicine, higher education, history, political science, and library science. 

Released in January, Artisanal Intelligence includes the two newest additions to the Hopkins Press Journals roster, Victorian Poetry and The Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.  

Catalog production is a collaborative effort in any year, but the 2024 catalog involved significant contributions from the entire Journals Division marketing team. Renewals Manager Sam London — data guru for the journals division — came up with the title Artisanal Intelligence as a way of focusing both on the personalized services Hopkins Press provides as well as the data-driven methods that underpin our reach and capacity. 

One of the key differentiators for Hopkins Press is our artisanal service. In the Journals Division, all our services are bespoke to each of our audiences: our editors, authors, associations, members, and readers.  

"Given their different roles in the Journals ecosystem," says London, "these audiences each wind up generating different data sets for us internally. For the catalog, we wanted to look at all these different collections of data and see what stories they might tell —both about the audiences and about how we serve them." 

In doing this research, London found that in 2023, our 378 editors worked with 4,860 distinct authors to publish 3,669 articles across 244 issues. And then she wondered about the geographic reach of the press.  

"To me the most exciting data set to work with was our client societies' memberships," London says. "I pulled out all that order history — rows upon rows upon rows — then started grouping it by location. I enlisted AI to help me approximate the aggregate distance of all these members from where we sit here in Baltimore, Maryland. When you start picturing our membership services in this geographic, 3D way, you can really appreciate the scope and scale." 

As a counterpoint to the data-driven focus of Artisanal Intelligence, graphic designer Karen Coughlin hand-drew the catalog images, creating a catalog that echoes classic artist sketchbooks.  

“Part of our goal with the catalog is for people to really enjoy looking through them,” says Coughlin. “Prior to computers, or everything was done by hand. And I love that idea that all this stuff that we take for granted used to be done by pen and ink, so these are meant to look more like sketches, to give the feel of drawing. ” 

Artisanal Intelligence, the 2024 Hopkins Press Journals catalog, is now available to browse. 

Throughout the year, we will occasionally feature some of the data and drawings from the catalog on Hopkins Press Journals social media and here on the blog.