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. 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 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 citicism, 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.

Drucker is internationally renowned for her book art, which touches on a variety of themes, especially "the exploration of the conventions of narrative prose and the devices by which it orders, sequences, and manipulates events according to its own logic" as well as "the use of experimental typography to expand the possibilities of prose beyond the linear format of traditional presentation."

Her work has been exhibited at universities, libraries, galleries, and museums throughout the world, including Museum of Arts and Design, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York Public Library, Scripps College, Walter Phillips Gallery, University of Virginia, Smith College, Yale University, Rutgers University, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Santa Cruz, Purdue University, University of Arizona, University of Wisconsin, Houston Public Library, San Francisco Center for the Book, SUNY, Victoria and Albert Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Columbia University, Pomona College, Harvard University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Art Institute of Chicago, California College of Arts and Crafts, University of the Arts , Istvan Kiraly Museum in Budapest, Barnard College, and Parsons School of Design.

Online exhibits of Drucker's work can be seen here:

• The Art of the Book
• A Chronology of Books from 1970 to 1994
• Artists' books online
• E-Poetry: Johanna Drucker

• Against Fiction: Organized Affinities (1983)
• As No Storm or the Any Port Party (1975)
• Bookscape (1988)
• Cuba (2005) (with Brad Freeman)
• The Current Line (1996)
• Damaged Nature / Salvage Culture (2005)
• Damaged Spring: Pink Noire (2003)
• Dark Decade (1995)
• Dark, The Bat Elf Banquets the Pupae (1972)
• Deterring Discourse (1993)
• Dolls of the Spirit (1980)
• Emerging Sentience (2001)
• Events: Particle Zoo (2005)
• Experience of the Medium (1978)
• Fragile (1977)

• From A to Z (1977)
• From Now (2005)
• A Girl's Life (2002)
• Graphical Investigations (2005)
• History of the/my Wor(l)d (1990)
• It Happens Pretty Fast (1982)
• Italy (1980)
• Jane Goes Out w' the Scouts (1980)
• Just As (1983)
• Kidz (1979)
• Narratology (1994)
• Netherland: (How) So Far (1978)
• Nightcrawlers on the Web (2000)
• Nova Reperta (2000)
• OTHERSPACE: Martian Ty(o)pography (1992)

• Prove Before Laying (1997)
• Quantum (2001)
• 'S crap 'S ample (1980)
• Sample Dialog (1989)
• Simulant Portrait (1990)
• Spectacle (1984)
• Subjective Meteorology (2005)
• Testament of Women (2006)
• The Surprise Party Or (1977)
• Three Early Fictions (1994)
• Through Light and the Alphabet (1986)
• Tongues: a parent language (1982)
• Twenty-six '76 (1976)
• The Word Made Flesh (1989)