Drucker's research focuses on alphabet historiography, modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, the history of visual information design, history of the book and print culture, history of information, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation. Her monograph, ''The Century of Artist's Book'' (1995), was the first monograph length publication on the topic of artist's books. Most recently, her scholarship has focused on information visualization, "which draws heavily on models from the empirical sciences, where approaches based on representation and transparency prevail." In contrast to this approach, Drucker stresses the rhetorical and performative nature of visualization, with emphasis on interpretation. She contends that digital tools should be used to "design graphic forms that inscribe subjectivity and affective judgment."
Books 1990s In her first book,
Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition (1994), Drucker maps
visual arts discourses through a rigorous examination of the rhetoric of 19th and 20th century critical writing and art practice. In the process, she theorizes the modernist tradition of visual art through a rhetoric of representation rather than from a formalist or historical approach, particularly regarding
space, the ontology of the object, and the production of
subjectivity. In
The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (1994), Drucker contends that much art criticism of
Futurism,
Dada, and
Cubism has failed to appreciate the fundamental materiality of these movements in relation to both visual and poetic forms of representation. Drucker emphasized, for the first time, the extent to which typographic activity furthered debates about the very nature and function of the
avant-garde. Continuing with her interest in letterform, Drucker's next book,
The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (1995) analyzes the history of the alphabet, not just as a collection of arbitrary signs, but as the direct visual embodiment of meaning in relation to intellectual movements. For example, she shows how modern typefaces, first developed in the late 18th century, embody Enlightenment philosophy. Shifting her focus to
artist books, ''Century of Artists' Books'' (1995) is the first full-length analysis of the development of artists' books as a 20th-century art form, exploring their structure, form, and conceptualization. Analyzing such artistic luminaries as
William Morris,
Marcel Duchamp, and
Max Ernst, Drucker considers the book as metaphor, poem, and narrative or non-narrative sequence by situating its historical, theoretical, sociological, and technical aspects within 20th century avant-garde art movements.
Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics (1998) is a collection of selected critical essays by Drucker previously published in literary and scholarly journals. The book begins with a discussion of her work as a
book artist and an account of what led her to pursue her scholarly interests. She provides close readings of contemporary language artists and the use of language in cyberspace.
2000s In collaboration with Brad Freeman, Drucker produced
Nova Reperta (2000), inspired by illustrations by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Johannes
Stradanus. Work on
Nova Reperta was originally begun by Drucker and Freeman in 1993, who planned to include the work in the exhibition ''Science and the Artist's Book
organized by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. She collaborated again with Freeman on Emerging Sentience'' (2001), a work that reflects Drucker's interest in the literature of artificial intelligence and the development of digital media. Her work,
The Century of Artist Books (2004) describes artist books in the 20th century. In
Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (2005), Drucker calls for a revamp of the academic critical vocabulary to something more befitting new forms and practices in
contemporary art, especially as it engages with material culture. Considered at the cutting edge of art criticism,
Sweet Dreams details the clear departure of artists from modernist avant-garde movements and shows the ways in which art criticism can shift its terms and sensibilities.
Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (2008) is an edited volume that traces the social and cultural role of visual communication from prehistory to the present, from logos to posters, from the political to the commercial, from early writing to digital design. The book details the ways in which designers have historically shaped graphic forms and effects. Taking up evolving issues of methodology in the burgeoning field of
digital humanities,
SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (2009) emphasizes the visual over the written system, the generative over the descriptive, and aesthetic subjectivity over analytic objectivism by building on the collective intellectual ferment of digital humanities as it developed at the
University of Virginia, one of the universities where the field of digital humanities first developed.
2010s In
Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014), Drucker fuses digital humanities, media studies, and graphic design history to provide a descriptive critical language for the analysis of graphical knowledge and outline the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content, particularly the
graphical user interface. Throughout 2012-2014, her artist books were featured in a travelling retrospective: Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects. A reviewer noted that "
Diagrammatic Writing (2014) is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning."
2020s •
Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display, MIT Press, 2020. •
Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist (about
Ilia Zdanevich), Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. •
Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present, University of Chicago Press, 2022, 380 pp. ==Selected scholarly work==